True confession time: There is nothing – NOTHING – BUT NOTHING! – beats a pizza!
There it is I’ve said it.
It’s all kinds of things, and it’s one thing. Pizza goes back, back to ancient times, the Time of the Toga, Reign of Caesar, the time of Aristotle and Plato ... back to the simple, clear basics of flour, water, cheese and some kind of sauce to hold it together. Focaccia is what that’s called today, the mother of it all.
It’s perennial peasant food, and as a peasant, I can relate to that. It’s a stomach-pleaser that’s cheap and ready, hot and now. It’s the friendliest of fast foods.
Where do you get your pizza? Where is your pizza Shangri-la?
It’s all over the place. Sam’s Pizza in Oglesby. Peru Pizza House (in Peru). Lou’s La Grotto and Palermo Pizza, Peru. Alfano’s of course. Marchelloni’s (hey, try their beef roll; amazing). Maria’s in Peru. Sam’s in Ottawa, along with R. Grotto and that other one, “world famous” it is, Bianchi’s. Princeton has its great Pizza Cellar. Streator has Joe’s Station House and Planet Pizza. And up in Sheridan is Francesca Pizza.
There needs to be a Pizza Olympics here.
You’ve got thin crust pizza, deep dish pizza, Detroit pizza, New York pizza, Chicago style, Quad Cities style, stuffed pizza, California style oven baked.
Ingredients are important. Some pizza places make their money on their crust and others on their cheese. Ingredients are important and I very strongly believe a pizza place needs good sausage and good cheese especially. I like Hawaiian pizza and taco pizza, and, yeah, sauerkraut and Canadian bacon – and every kind of pizza under the sun, to be honest.
Of course there are chains and chains and chains of pizza places. At one time, I worked at Happy Joe’s, hands full of mozzarella. I’d smell it on my hands when I went to sleep at night. I mostly enjoyed working the oven and making sure the top was getting cooked nice and even.
Frozen pizza is its own kind of science. We’ll discuss that subject in the next lecture ...
I’m a long-time fan of Chicago deep dish. Been to Due’s, been to Uno’s. All that cheese, excellent sausage, fascinating crust. A while back I decided to get scientific and really get to know how to make it. I had two kinds of flour, a mix of cheeses, and a long-simmering sauce with a bit of wine there. There are all kinds of recipes and I finally found the one that worked best for me. Pro tip: Cornmeal isn’t really such a thing.
I’ve got the blue-steely rectangular pans for making Detroit style pizza, and the secret there is really the brick cheese. And sticking with pepperoni and a modicum of sauce. The big thing for Detroit pizza is the crispy, almost burnt cheese along the edges. There’s a French word for this kind of crispy cooked cheese, but I don’t know it.
So I have made a lotta pizza. And I gained 15 pounds. So I stopped making pizza. I lost 15 pounds. But I love eating pizza. And like beer, pizza is something I intake only occasionally since it’s bad for the waistline. BUT this does make it a special treat when I allow it.
Pizza is an art and it’s a great fantasy to have a pizza place – coming up with something unique and very tasty. I’d go source cheese in Wisconsin. Make a unique blend. I would experiment and experiment, again and again, with crust and sauce. So much can be done, so many ways to go. Each source for toppings would be carefully selected. It all has to come together into something remarkable – something people love, something people talk about, something people dream about.
And if it’s done very well, you become a Town Institution, loved and venerable. Pizza is life, no?
Todd Volker lives in Ottawa with his wife and son, and they enjoy reading, kayaking, hiking, tennis and camping. He’s a lifelong learner with books in his hands.