Too Hot to Cook: Let’s Talk About Pizza

Ah yes, we’ve reached the time of year where we are laid out in a cool basement, or beneath a ceiling fan, or wandering around Target, soaking in the air conditioning. Unless your home is blessed with that mythical wonder that is Central Air, I’m guessing you’re a lot like me and haven’t wanted to do much cooking. So let’s talk about pizza instead.

Now, I do like making pizza at home, when turning on the oven is a reasonable idea. My husband makes a fantastic dough using Pepsi made with real sugar or Mexican Coke, and he is the only person I’ve ever met who can approximate ingredient amounts while baking. He adds flour and whatnot until it seems “right,” and since the results are often great, I leave him to it. I’m usually in charge of making the sauce we’re using – tomato, pesto or peanut, usually.

Still, in 85+ degree (F) weather, I’d rather let someone else do the work.

Probably for many of us, ordering pizza means ordering from wherever has the best deal, toppings to price-wise. I’ll admit that there’s great convenience in picking up a $5 pepperoni from Little Caesars or doing whatever 2-topping deal Domino’s has, even though both places hardly make transcendent pizza. It’s good enough, but not the kind of meal where you think, “Oh man, I could eat this forever and die happy.”

Independent of cost and ease, what I want to know is, what is your perfect pizza?

For my eight-year-old daughter, the answer surprised me. Usually she is such a carnivore and would probably eat her weight in bacon if I let her, but the pizza she still goes on and on about, nine months later, was a vegetarian option from a restaurant in San Francisco. Made with thin crust and pesto, it was covered in yellow and orange heirloom tomatoes. About the only thing she said throughout the entire meal was, “This is so good.” She’s since requested that we recreate it with the tomatoes we can get at the farmers’ market here in Montana.

Me, I love a good veggie pizza, and I don’t eat pork unless it comes in the form of pepperoni. I find salami gross, but for whatever reason, its round cousin is especially delicious. Recently, my husband and I had a (glorious) child-free dinner in Spokane, WA at a new-ish place called South Perry Pizza. We ordered their veggie – tomato sauce, provolone, Parmesan, red onions, red peppers, roma tomatoes, fresh baby spinach – and added their uncured pepperoni as another topping. Three months later, I’m still thinking about when I can visit again and make the exact same order. If I lived in that neighborhood, as a few of my friends do, the employees would know me by name. I’m sure their other offerings are great, but what we ate was perfect.

So tell me, can you remember the best pizza you ever had? Do you love the cheapo stuff and you don’t care who knows it? Did you once try an unusual topping that you ended up loving? Let’s make each other hungry.