When evaluating pizza, what characteristics are most important and least important to you?

Evaluating the Perfect Pizza

I live in the New York/New Jersey area. I am very particular about my pizza. Gladly we have a lot of great options. I assess pizza based on the following characteristics:

• Crust – The crust of a pizza is the most important part for me. While other components can ruin even the best crust, I contend you can never have an excellent pizza without a really good crust. The two parts of a good crust are texture and flavor. The texture should be tender and airy inside with an outer crust that has a bit of tougher “chew” to it. The flavor should have a rich, developed character that has been created through the dough preparation process. I also like the crust to be fully cooked with no doughy or soggy sections even in the center of the pizza.
• Sauce and Cheese – I put sauce and cheese together as equally important to having a good pizza. The sauce and cheese need to be of a decent quality and there needs to be a good balance of both evenly spread on the pizza. With the sauce, it’s better to err on the side of too little sauce and with the cheese it’s better to err on the side of too much.
• Toppings – My only requirement for toppings is that they are fresh and of decent quality. If I ask for mushrooms and they’re jarred or canned mushrooms, that will ruin a pizza. If I ask for extra garlic and they use minced garlic from a jar, it will lower my opinion of the pizza. Toppings like meatballs or sausage can be very subjective, but as long as they’re of good quality, it won’t ruin a pizza for me.

Recent Pizzas

In the last two weeks, I’ve eaten two pizzas that I’d consider good. This past Sunday, I had a pizza from a local place called Nomad Pizza. The crust was excellent. It had perfect texture and chew. It also had a decent flavor. Sauce and cheese were perfect both in quality and quantity and the toppings were exceptional.

I had a meatball and fresh Serrano pepper pizza (it was one of the specials that day) and Thaddeus had the spicy sausage and onion pizza (standard menu option). I particularly loved how the fresh Serrano peppers worked with the meatballs.

The other pizza I had while I was in Massachusetts visiting my sister’s family and my mom. It’s the take-out pizza in the feature image. The crust had a decent texture and the flavor was okay. It was definitely made with fresh dough, but there wasn’t a ton of character in the flavor. Texture was a little thicker than I prefer, but perfectly okay. Cheese, sauce and toppings were all good (we had olives, sausage and mushrooms). I had a cold piece for breakfast the following morning and it held up well enough. Cold pizza conveys less flavor than hot, so the crust’s flavor came through even less.

Expert Tip for Ordering Pizza

A friend of mine gave me a great tip when you have to order pizza from a place that does mediocre crusts. Ask them to cook it well-done. This does two things. First, it helps ensure the crust won’t be doughy. Second, it actually adds flavor to the crust, especially if there is some flour residue on the dough before it goes in the oven.

Current Knitting

With traveling to be with my mom, I was only able to finish weaving in the ends on the latest open-finger gloves that I presented in the last blog entry.

I’m quite pleased with how they turned out and hope the recipient will enjoy them.