Prospecting for Purveyors of Perfect Pizza

As a young single who is often too lazy to cook, I, like many others greatly enjoy the simplicity of pizza.  Simply order a pizza from a place, wait some amount of time, generally 10-20 minutes and you have food for generally 2 to 3 meals.  More than simplicity though, pizza has always evoked a sense of community for me, even when eaten alone.  From pizza parties to sharing a pizza with family, the idea of a pizza has always been one I enjoyed.  Moreover, the variety that comes with pizza is immense.  Get some dough, some sauce, traditionally marinara but sometimes white or bbq depending on your tastes, cover with cheese and you have a basic pizza.  From there add any multitude of toppings from onions to pepperoni, ricotta to mushrooms, anchovies (yuck) to prosciutto or meatballs.

So what exactly does prospecting for purveyors of perfect pizza really mean and what am I gonna do about it?  Well one, I really like alliteration because it makes for fun sounding phrases.  I was also inspired by the burrito bracket running on Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight.  While I don't have a wealth of chefs and food writers to give me recommendations, I do have time, the time to visit as many pizza places as possible.  Why pizza in particular?  Well I want to see just what makes good pizza and what makes great pizza.  So let's get to it, what am I gonna rate these pizza on?

First off, the crust.  The crust is the backbone of a pizza, when well made it provides a good amount of bite.  It shouldn't be flaccid when picked up but also not so dense that when you're done eating it feels like a stone in your stomach.  A great crust is also flavorful so you don't feel tempted to just leave the crust behind when the rest of the pizza is gone.

Second, the sauce.  A good pizza sauce can take on many forms.  Some sauces are sweet while others are salty.  Some have whole chunks of tomatoes while others are just pureed.  Some are flavored with herbs.  All that said, to me a good pizza sauce should be unassuming yet flavorful.  The sauce should not be cloyingly sweet yet shouldn't completely blend into the background.

Third, the cheese.  What kind of pizza doesn't have cheese?  The answer is a bad one, AKA not a pizza.  The only real cheese for a pizza is mozzarella.  While other cheeses can be used, most notably provolone and ricotta, neither is suitable for covering an entire pizza.  Parmesan is definitely not suitable as it doesn't readily melt the way mozzarella does.  It does however make a good extra topping if you crave that bit of extra cheese and salt.  Using good quality cheese makes a huge difference in the taste of a pizza and must be considered.

Fourth, the toppings.  Topping quality also matters.  Many of the more chain pizza restaurants skimp on their toppings using lower quality toppings even when the cheese and sauce are adequate.  Nothing really beats a great pepperoni pizza and nothing can be more revealing.  If you think that all pepperoni is made equal, you'd be sorely mistaken.  Some history on pepperoni.  Pepperoni is a cured sausage like salami.  The term pepperoni comes from the Italian word, peperone in plural form, meaning bell pepper.  While that doesn't really mean too much anymore, a good pepperoni is somewhat spicy and should have a strong taste that isn't just the taste of salty meat.

Lastly, and this one's really just for all those single people out there, how does the pizza taste cold or reheated?  Everyone has a leftover pizza once in a while and to me, next day pizza is sometimes just as good.  That said, some pizzas are terrible cold.  Others are terrible microwaved (really all of them).  While others still come back to life when reheated in an oven for a couple minutes.  While this particular category isn't the most taste based, I like to think that it's just as important, if only because I really do like next day pizza.

Since I don't travel super often, I'll be keeping most of these local to me, which at the moment is Austin, Texas.  When I do end up traveling and have a hankering for pizza, I'll add those too.  I won't be giving numerical grades yet as I don't have a huge wealth of experience with rating pizza yet but I do plan to in the future.  Whenever I go to a place I'll get a pepperoni pizza because that way I can control for the most factors and so the pizza isn't covered by extra tastes.  While that might not be fair to some of the more upscale places, a pepperoni pizza is always on the menu and has the least number of ingredients to cover all of my focus areas.  In any case, expect a lot of pizza in the coming months because the search for the best pizza begins.

As a note, I'm not sure what I should be using as a plural for pizza.  Pizzas sounds right for English but also seems awkward.  In Italian, the plural is pizze, which is fine but also doesn't fit the general flow of English sentences.  I'll go with whatever I think sounds right and be completely inconsistent so bear with me on that while I figure out which pizza places to go to.

--CsMiREK