[Sca-cooks] Pizza was Re; Philly Cheese Steak

[Pixel, Goddess and Queen]

>
> Re pizza, I'm reminded of Robert B. Parker's fictional sentiments on
> beer ("the worst beer I ever had was wonderful"; I forget which
> Spenser book it's in). It's extremely likely that the worst pizza in
> New York is as good as, or better than, much of what is out there in
> the rest of the country, with the exception of deep dish pizza,
> which, of course, you would get in Chicago. See, deep dish pizza is
> probably our local equivalent of other types of pizza elsewhere: it's
> almost invariably made by large corporate chains, not hand-stretched,
> and generally treated with disrespect even as it is being made; it
> loses out both in the recipe (the Stouffer recipe kitchen concept, I
> mean) and the technique (mostly made by more or less unskilled labor).
>
> Conversely, the majority of other pizza around here is still more or
> less the result of artisan baking, even if many industrialized
> shortcuts have been introduced into the process.
>
> Adamantius

*Properly made* Chicago deep-dish pizza is divine. Poorly made Chicago
deep-dish is bread with tomato sauce on it. I get my deep-dish pizza fix
when I visit the parental homestead. The Brooklyn-born husband claims to
have found real NY pizza in St. Paul, on the skyway somewhere, made by
real honest-to-odin transplanted Brooklyn Eye-talians, but apparently
they're only open for lunch.

The style of pizza that is done well here by the local places is a thin
crispy crust without any real edge to it that I tend to refer to as
cracker pizza--and it must be cut in squares. You can't eat proper cracker
pizza in wedges, it just doesn't work.

Bleu cheese? On *pizza*? <shudder>

Oh, and as for Papa John's--don't bother. They're a step above Domino's,
which isn't saying a whole heck of a lot. Basically they're slightly less
nasty than Domino's, but still pretty lousy pizza. There are frozen pizzas
that are better than Papa John's.

Margaret, who spent the weekend moving furniture and driving the "normal"
people crazy at the Viking's exhibit at the Science Museum