Finally! I was on the radio eating pizza about a month ago. It seems like a long time. I recorded the event to give you, my pizza partners, a look into what it’s like to judge pizza.
Also, you see a bit of the Star 100.7 studios and what I’m like at 6:30 am.
“Fried NYC Pizza.” Half cooked in an oven then put into a skillet, this pizza is cooked from bottom to top instead of top to bottom.
The topping are room temperature and the crust is blackened and crispy. The mismanagement of heat is somewhat concerning, but it’s a peculiar and still tasty pie.
Seen at the Brooklyn Flea - Pizza Moto is just churning out wood fired pizza on the go like it ain’t no thing. Portable pizza heaven, giving birth to little pizzas around the world.
Law & Order: Pizza Victims Unit.
Along a dismal sidewalk that can’t make up its mind between being dark grey or slate grey, lies this poor pizza. This sidewalk, much like the neighbors, is indifferent to the corpse of a pizza. Just a standard note in the harmony of life.
The pizza, young and full of pepperoni, was mangled and sliced in half. The grease marks left behind are plentiful and denote a playful death. This pizza did not go quiet into the good oven.
Pete’s APizza (apizza?) brings the “famous New Haven” apizza to the depths of Washington, DC. As the nation’s capitol it’s only appropriate that there is a selection of pizza from across the United States.
I’ve never heard of New Haven Style pizza, but I’m always up for a new spin on the classic pie. I mean, what makes pizza so amazing is it’s a cuisine made up of three basic ingredients: bread, cheese, sauce. That’s it. Anyone with a $2 bill could gather enough ingredients to build a pizza. So any spin on the formula without adding a cesspool of toppings is an exciting thing to a pizza journalist.
What’s funny about DC is that it’s tough to come across a place that will sell a single slice of pizza to you. It’s like bizarro New York city. But Pete’s Apizza fills that tiny hole in your tiny pizza heart.
Once you pick the apizza you want from their minuscule apizza zoo, you pick out how many pitchers of Peroni you’ll be enjoying.
It’s casual for sure, but this is no Sbarro’s. It’s a smart and intelligent take on pizza that Henry Ford would be proud of. Quite a streamlined process. They even give you a little table card.
Eight is the number of slices I wish I had ordered.
So here’s the pizza. Sorry, apizza. It’s simple and efficient, much like their process. There’s no mess and no excess of anything. It’s quaint. Just how I imagine New Haven to be.
For as basic as it looks, this pizza is full of that crunch.
It’s as if there’s invisible crust on the top of the pizza. It’s surrounded by an aura of brittleness that breaks apart as soon as your canines find their way into the cheese. From top to bottom, it’s crust. Not crusty because that’s a bad thing. But crunchy, shattering, crust. Laminated with cheese.
The sauce, well, I’m not sure there is any sauce. Check out this cross section.
You can’t even fold this pizza in half without worrying about a pizza splinter breaking off of the mother ship and blinding you. Never able to witness pizza bubbling in the oven again.
Or see what time it is in Naples. Or New Haven.
I found the pizza a bit dry and too full of crunch. It’s special. But I think I prefer something a bit on the softer side. But, for fans of crust I think you’re in for a treat.
And here’s some Peroni being poured–a necessary to keep your whistle nice and whet.
Some graffiti I found in a bar. Most of the drawings on the wall were in reference to “Frezza.” I can only assume that Frezza is some sort of pizza god.
A vignette of me grilling pizza that is actually watchable! Sorry about the previous upload.
Me grilling pizza. A vignette. Of terrible quality.
Remember when I was on the radio talking about pizza? Oh, no? Well I was summoned by the spirits of pizza and delivered to the studios at Star 100.7 to judge Pittsburgh’s finest pizza.
Things got messy.
How could it not? Imagine being in a room with 11 other pizza judges are sleepy pizza delivery people make their way out to Green Tree at 7am to deliver pies that were once piping hot. Their trip through the tunnels and the resulting traffic, has zapped them of much of their enthusiasm After the journey, the pizza emerged, but changed. Like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon. But this metamorphosis was less beautiful, and more, well, tired. The pizza was very tired of being a pizza and it showed. But pizza wasn’t meant to travel else it would have grown wings and fly itself to the destination.
Sure it’s wheel-shaped, but that’s only for looks. I’m telling you this because that is a very important caveat when it comes to judging pizza and, one of the most challenging aspects. When you’re eating aged pizza you have to be able to assess what the pizza was like. Can your tastebuds time travel? No, but it must be able to reverse engineer the pizza to understand what it tasted like two hours ago when it birth from the oven.
A rare-skill.
But that didn’t deter us one bit. We were bubbling over with enthusiasm. The possibility of becoming one with so many pizzas at 7am was exactly what we dreamed of as kids. “Mom, I promise I’ll do all my homework if I can just not go to school and eat pizza then take naps all day.” Okay. Sure. And then pizzas started showing up.
These pizzas were nothing less than ostentatious. The majority of which were piled high with meats, cheeses, and wacky sauces. These pizzas leaned more towards meat cornucopia and stretched the definition of pizza.
Of course, on the opposite end of the spectrum was the avant garde types that left many judges scratching their head at what exactly they were looking at. Let’s just assume that many of these minimalist pizzas were ahead of their time.
The pizza makers tried to impress the judges by showing us that, yes, they could add a Jenga-style tower of meat on top of their sturdy crust. Did they think we’d be impressed by the lake of grease it left behind? Or the heaps of garlic that would have dissolved any vampire within a mile radius?
These two pizzas above didn’t win anything - which is too bad! Because in their own way they were delicious. Just not after their journey. Or at 7am. And after 16 pizzas the judges spoke and one pizza rose above the others.
This little sliver of a pizza. A humble pizza. This was chosen instead of the monstrous piles or meats or overly complex slices we were served. This wasn't decadent but one of the simplest slices of pizza a human could create. If Indiana Jones were looking for the Slice of a Carpenter, he would choose this one. And choose wisely.
The winning pizza belonged to Pizza Parma located in Shady Side on Highland Ave. It best epitomized what pizza is. A fun, simple experience, that reminds you that sometimes the most simple things in life are the best things.
Outside Fazio’s pizza is a new sign promising BIG New York Cuts.
The grade school drawing aside, Fazio’s is run by a guy who spent his Summers as a youth in the New York area making pizza. If anyone in Pittsburgh could deliver on this promise I’d say it’s the folks at Fazio’s.
Today is Vegan Pizza Day! Make a pizza, eat a pizza, try a new pizzeria, take your friend out for pizza… whatever you want to do just EAT SOME DANG PIZZA!
There’s a Facebook group for it!
Folks in LA are definitely getting excited and my brother is even doing a vegan pizza crawl so…
Notes and thoughts of a pizza judge
I dunno what happened, but I’m going to be part of a pizza judging competition that takes place on the radio. Gather your family and your favorite pizza treasures (pizza cutter, pizza bib, pizza pin) and tune in to Star 100.7 tomorrow morning between 7am and 9am.
I have no idea what the itinerary is, but there will be at least 30 pizzas to try and I made sure to let them know I was a pizza journalist so they know I mean business. I’ll document the event as much as possible. I expect a to emerge from this with a brand new face full of pizza acne.
If anyone has the chapter from Emily Post about eating pizza on the radio, please forward that to me ASAP.
“As far as I know I’m the only pizza journalist in the Pittsburgh area.”
My 6 year old cousin created this awesome pizza dude who shoots chorizos, it was so cool that I had to draw it too.
Art on kid!
Woah! A pizza super hero. I always thought Pizza Man was a man who vowed to protect and serve pizza to patrons of his Pizza Cave. Never did I think it would be an actual pizza that shoots chorizos.
I can see this taking off. Pizza Man - half cheese, half pepperoni, all justice.
This level 10 Pizzaiolo badge from Foursquare! What an accomplishment, i feel like I’ve actually achieved something. And to think I’m just now scratching the pizza surface.
I’D CALL THE PIZZA DOG ISSUE THE CITIZEN KANE OF COMICS, BUT IT’S MORE ACCURATE TO SAY CITIZEN KANE IS THE PIZZA DOG ISSUE OF FILMS @woozle
— Pizza Dog (@Pizza_Dog) June 26, 2013
A man threatening to jump from a South Carolina bridge was coaxed off the ledge with a pizza, police say. The man parked his vehicle on a shoulder of the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge at about 6:50 a.m.
This is what it’s all about. Why I write about pizza and prod people to tell me their secret pizza desires. No one wants to admit it, but pizza is really the one thing the universe has in common. It’s a great unifier. Some dough held together by cheese and brought to life with some red sauce. It’s the personification of life.
Glad to see this guy is okay. Hopefully the warmth of that pizza will remind him that life is too precious to throw away. Especially considering the amount of good pizza out there.
This scene is all too familiar in the Tallarico-Cardone household. All too familiar…
