Saturday, March 25, 2006

Pizza! Pizza!

Where is the GOOD stuff?

Glenn ‘the Blogfather’ Reynolds is mussing about Bill Quick’s mussing about pizza.

In my opinion, good food is like ‘gold’, i.e., it’s where you find it. That applies to pizza....

I remember places that are [in]famous for their lousy stuff. The top [or bottom] of that heap being the cardboard pizza that the contracted bozos on Fort Bragg would deliver to the poor saps on guard duty, as nobody else would do such in the early 70s. Drop some sauce and cheese in the bottom of the box, put on a few pieces of meat and deliver. Utter dreck. But it beat the stuff from the mess hall.

Then again, there were the bright, luminary-esque points too.

[1] Valentino’s in Lincoln, Nebraska. Legendary for it’s flavor and the ability to put women whose pregnancy was 8+ months along into labor. I can hear the kid now, “LEMME OUTTA HERE!” [Note: Ask my sister about this. She was laughing about the reports she’d heard as we ate there, I being a visitor had asked it. Five hours later, my brother-in-law was hammering on the bedroom door and explaining he had to take her to the hospital IMMEDIATELY. A fine and healthy son/nephew was the result.]

[2] Some place in southern Germany. SUPERB stuff. Not that much sauce. The tomato flavor was in the sun-dried tomatoes that graced the topping.

[3] In my opinion, locally, Domino’s did a good job of offering pizza. Especially in the Englewood, CO [south of Denver] area. However, you had to be assertive about extra sauce and cheese.  I think their sauce was the best of all I’d tried, in all the years of doing Movie Nite there. Lord knows we had plenty of samplings from other sources in the area. People would bring pizza as their offering for the evening’s entertainments.

There had been another place, whose name escapes me here, but they were ‘inconsistent’ in their offerings for delivery.

[4] Then there is Bourbon Street Pizza, in the Denver area; vicinity of Belleview and Yosemite. Great guys. Great service. Great ideas. Inspirational! That pretty much sums it up. No delivery. But great food at good prices. Very innovative approaches to pizza. I was fond of the pesto shrimp and Dracula’s Nightmare. The latter with some fine chianti.

In our new location, we’ve discovered that there is not much to choose from, in the way of great pizza. Oh well....look upon it as another opportunity.

So, we set to work. And, as a result, we’ve come up with a GREAT pizza crust. It involves sourdough bread, parmesian cheese and various herbs and spices.

We already had a good marinara sauce, but it’s a bit tart for pizza. So we’ve added some other ingredients to mitigate that.

Now, we’re in the process of developing a list of topping combinations that will excite the pallettes of all who come.

We’ve had one major success when we hosted the annual retreat of a group we belong to. The luncheon was designed around built-your-own-pizza. Everyone had a lot of fun. I saw grown-up ‘children’ with so much multi-colored Play-Doh®.

Less...