Obsession and Pizza

Pizza. We think of it as Italian, but it feels quintessentially American.

If you're not in a major city, then pizza is what a place like Pizza Hut makes, or Papa John's. These are pizza for the masses. It's the McDonald's of pizza. Tasty. Convenient.

Completely lacking in passion.

There, I did it. Used the word passion.

But here, I mean an obsession with making something different, raising it to a level of art, though I think of this much like gingerbread houses being raised to a level of art. At some point, no matter how beautiful, no matter how ingenious, there is something a bit fundamentally amateurish about gingerbread houses. I feel the same way about pizza. It's like elevating beer. It can be done. It has been done. But somehow, it doesn't feel like wine.

To that end, a fellow named Jeff devoted a webpage to his six year adventure to reproduce the pizza made at his favorite NY pizzeria, Patsy's. Clearly, getting hired to work there would be the easiest way to figure it out. But he did it the hard way. Through years of trial and error.

And the result?

It is hard! The easy pizza you see the folks making at the corner pizzeria doesn't even come close to how hard it is to make top level pizza.

And to reiterate. If you ate the best pizza, you might think, so what? Is it slightly burnt? Eh, it's just odd pizza. I recall a friend who claimed he liked Kraft's Macaroni and Cheese. The original. Not any of the fancy successors. Presumably not even the real thing (though he would have been enough of a foodie that he could appreciate the real thing). He grew up with this glop, but that's what he remembers and loves. I imagine pizza is very much like that.

I'm reminded of this article (which is hard to get, so look it up in the Google cache based on the guy's URL) because I went to Mia's Pizza in Bethesda. This is one of the few DC pizza places that strives to make pizza at the next level, unlike, say, California Pizza Kitchen, which reimagines pizza as something else, replete with unusual toppings.

I'm also reminded of it because Justin recently went to NYC with his SO and they sampled some of these pizzas, which he claims is so far removed from what we normally call pizza that it shouldn't even be called that (OK, he didn't exactly say that, but he is prone to this kind of exaggeration, so I feel justified, or should I say, justinified, to say it).

I have no idea if I'd ever attempt to make such a pizza (answer is no), but it stands as a testament to human obsession to create something exemplary, and to do so in a way that pays homage to science and engineers everywhere. Observation and trial and error, and a lot of devotion to making the perfect pie.