There’s a dollar-slice store near my place that leaves a big ol’ salt shaker on the counter for people to use. You know the big shakers that usually contain crushed dry peppers or grated parmesan? Just like that, only with smaller holes on the lid. (There is, by the way, no parmesan or hot pepper to be had.)
Now, this place, like a lot of dollar-slice enterprises, serves up something that is not quite Pizza As We Know It. I think the proprietors are Syrian – maybe Syrian-style pizza is as distinct from Italian pizza as North American-style pizza is, only in an entirely different way. The dough is soft-- real soft-- and puffy, like it has an unreasonable amount of baking powder in it. The crust is in no wise crispy, and sometimes seems not so much a baked crust as warmed dough. The cheese is usually absent from the outer four inches of the pie, and the entire thing is so liberally coated in olive oil that it runs off the pizza, quickly rendering the entire paper plate it’s served on transparent enough to read through.
I’ve often speculated that, with this being such exotic pizza, maybe the proffered salt is strictly a cultural thing. The shaker is always full, and I’ve never observed anyone making use of it. I tend to assume that no one does. If this is true, though, I’m at a loss to explain why it remains on the counter. After a couple of years, surely they’d notice that no-one really wants to salt their pizza.
This line of speculation leads me to a troubling possibility: That some people actually might be applying sodium chloride crystals to their oily and vaguely cheesy dough, and the salt shaker is therefore occasionally refilled. Although my rational mind rejects this hypothesis utterly, I can find no other plausible explanation for the worrying presence of the salt dispenser. No other products, with the exception of canned pop, are sold at this store. Salted Coke seems just as unlikely as salted pizza, though.
So now I simply have to know-- do some people really put salt on their pizza?
I wouldn’t usually put salt on pizza, per se, but it’s a fact that olive oil and salt are an excellent combination. There’s a place in NYC (Otto) that makes olive oil gelato with a sprinkling of kosher salt on the top… mmmmmm mmm…
People, people, people…When are they going to realize that prepared foods like this already have far more salt than the diners will ever need?
Now, then: I know a guy who salts his french fries. His frikkin’ french fries!
If he got them at Burger King, they’d already be mostly all salt, so I wonder if he’d add to them? Probably.
Well, there were enough affirmations here, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised by counter-intuitive flavour-combinations enough in the past, that I felt compelled to make a special trip to the dollar-slice store, in the rain, to see for myself exactly how salt complimented the dollar-slice experience.
I had two slices, one feta & garlic and one spicy slice.
The four-inch diameter surface area of the shaker and the numerous (and large) perforations in the lid conspired to make lightly salting the slices a challenge.
I had reservations about applying salt to the feta slice, since feta is already quite salty, but the moistness of the slice actually helped. (At this relatively late hour, I fear both slices had spent more than the optimal time under the heat lamps, allowing them to dry out a bit.) It wasn’t too bad, it turns out. On the whole, though, I don’t think the thought “needs more salt” will cross my mind the next tme I have a feta & garlic slice.
The spicy slice, on the other hand, had visible salt crystals sitting on its surface. Eating it was like eating any other cheap pizza slice, except about a hundred times more caustic. The salt stung my lips, and then the capscum went to work on the chemical burns.
The most positive impression that I had of the experience was that the salted pizza greatly enhanced my enjoyment of the can of Coke that washed it down. The phosphoric acid became a gentle balm to my stricken orifice.
Abbie Carmichael, that is the most perverse thing I’ve ever heard – and my last girlfriend liked to dress me up as her dead daddy.
