I need to get this off my chest. There’s a long-standing saying about blowjobs and pizza, and that either can be relatively “bad” yet still be “pretty good.”
This is not true. I have had very, very bad pizza in my life, and I’d honestly rather drink brine than eat something like that again. If you want, I’m sure I could attempt to reproduce my mistake, so long as I wouldn’t have to eat it again.
On the topic of disgusting school lunches, Mr. Holland’s Opus includes a scene where Holland lines up at the cafeteria and gets a plate full of “Turkey Spam Surprise”.
I’m perhaps the only person who can imagine that and think it’s delicious. Mmm.
Did you go to my school? Because we had the most disgusting rectangle pizza, specially designed to offened all palates. Cold tomato sauce, unmelted cheese, thick crumbly crust- it was horrible.
I don’t like reheated pizza. It just never tastes as good.
If it’s bad, it’s not pizza – it’s merely dough with tomato puree, cheese, some appropriate spices, and various other ingredients that has been subjected to a certain amount of heat for some time.
That said, I did have a bad pizza once, though – it started out tasty enough, but over time, the cheese, upon cooling, congealed into a rubber-like, tasteless, tentacular mass that appeared to be trying to mate with my face.
This is similar to my opinion. Honestly, I find eating pizza to be enjoyable, and I do not recall running into one that wasn’t. That said, certain pizzas are definitely better than others.
Actually, thinking about it some more, Pizza Hut was borderline too horrible to eat.
Well, the mystery (to me) is why people seem to like bad pizza. For example: DOMINO’s-how this stuff could be described as pizza is beyond me. The crust is usually soggy, and the tomato sauce is tasteless. Whatever they use in place of mozzarella cheese ( polyethylene plastic?) is horrble. Yet people obviously like this dreck-Dominos is a huge corporation, and is very profitable.
Which I guess confirms P.T. Barnum’s observation :“nobody ever went broke underestimating the American people’s taste…”
It takes a lot of effort to make a pizza I won’t like at all. I’ll eat frozen pizza from Totino’s to Tombstone to DiGiorno. Domino’s, Papa John’s, Pizza Hut, they’re all ok with me.
I do know what good pizza tastes like and sometimes I’ll make them myself (my only real option for good pizza in my area) but I don’t have a problem slumming it either. Growing up on Chef Boyardee pizza-kit-in-a-box may have given me greater tolerance for pizza than most.
I do avoid CiCi’s Pizza though. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere.
Pizza is an art. You foodies can sit on your high horse with your filet mignon and your weird fancy vegetables and look down on us, but you’re wrong. The crust needs to be just thin enough - not cracker-thin, and not too crispy. The sauce should never creep up onto the ‘handle’ of the crust. If you add too much or not enough salt to the dough, you’ve ruined it… The sauce must have just the right balance of flavors and textures, neither runny nor too thick, not too much garlic or oregano. The cheese is mozzarella, absolutely nothing else, grated fairly thickly, and enough to provide full coverage but not enough to overwhelm. You need to be able to fold it and the only thing to drip off should be some grease. If you try to serve me pizza which was removed from an oven more than ten minutes ago, you’re doing it wrong.
I was absolutely ruined for life because I grew up literally a block away from what may well be one of the best pizza joints in the US. It’s a little family-run place manned by a bunch of utterly stereotypical Italian brothers. Growing up we’d get a pizza once a week from there. I don’t recall ever having gotten a pizza that was not made to order and still too hot to touch when we got it home. It was fresh, the crust was crisp but not overly, there was just enough cheese, and when my sister was a picky kid, they knew exactly what ‘light sauce’ meant. This, I figured, was what real pizza was, and people were just joking when they said they liked Pizza Hut.
Then I moved out to New Mexico where Dominoes is the standard, and the two - only two! - non-chain pizza places do terrible, terrible things to pizza. Like putting green chile and sesame seeds on it, and baking it in a non-brick oven (oh god, why even bother?), and putting so little cheese on it that you can see through to the sauce. It’s awful.
And, uh, it’s occurred to me that I might take my pizza a little bit too seriously. But, really, if you’re ever in the south Jersey area, head to People’s Pizza in Cherry Hill. Get a slice of plain. You’ll thank me.
This is one of the benefits of living in New Jersey. It would take a heroic effort to find truly bad in the state. Not saying it can’t be done, but it’s a challenge.
I LOVED the rectangular pizza as a kid. I always had the same routine, even through junior high - scrape off the cheese/sauce/topping(if it existed) with a fork, consume, then roll the remainder up into a log, and dip into my ketchup/mayo combination and take a bite.
So it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that I will eat any pizza set in front of me. Even frozen ones (well, once cooked of course!) and even Cici’s. Now, I don’t make Cici’s a destination place to go on a Friday night, but I remember going once a month or so in high school. And I have a favorite local place.
Blowjobs on the other hand… well, I am notoriously picky.
I agree. I daresay that most pizza I’ve had is middling, at best. I’ll eat anything that’s put in front of me, but there’s only a handful of pizzas that I truly and utterly enjoy. I’ve had pizza so bad (think ketchup for tomato sauce), that it was only my ingrained sense of not being wasteful that kept me from throwing it straight into the garbage.