The quick fire cooked pizza to grab with a friend. Sticky mozzarella and finger sucking bacon star in this the quality but inexpensive 5 minute pie.
Let's start my first post with Blaze Pizza. I didn't know you could get a pizza made in 5 minutes. I was used to the old idea of walking into a pizza shop where they would sell you a slice of pizza that they just reheated in the pizza oven for you. Don't get me wrong, I've been to some pretty great pizza shops like that in my life, mostly in New York. So when we moved to Indy and a friend told us about places like Pie 5, Blaze and Mod Pizza, I thought there is no way those pizzas could be just as good as a traditional pizza you'd wait for in a restaurant or chain location, but man was I wrong.
I have had Blaze Pizza quite a few times, but I didn't have a blog at the time, so this post reflects the most recent experience I had with the chain restaurant. One of the many things I love about Blaze is how fresh everything tastes and the fact that you get to see your pizza being made from start to finish. Being the guy who likes the basics, I always go for their "2 top pizza". I get the red sauce, mozzarella cheese with pepperoni and bacon.
Now I always start with their traditional crust. I know they have a thicker crust now and I'll have to give that a try next time. Once we got my crust and my options were written on the parchment paper, we moved down the assembly line to choose a sauce. I always get the basic red. Now basic meaning the typical sauce you'd see on most pizza's, but their red sauce is anything but basic. It has a sweet finish to it and pairs nicely with the saltiness of the meats that we'll get to in just a minute. I then ask for their mozzarella and man is it fresh too.
You can always tell you are going to have a great mozzarella if the shreds stick together.
I'm sure you've all had some store bought shredded mozzarella where you could easily separate every single shred and that's just a shame. So my assembly worker pulls two handfuls of the fresh shredded cheese from the container and plops it right into the middle before spreading it evenly around the pie. Then we move onto the meats. The assembly worker puts on the meats written on my sheet of parchment before asking if I'd like to top my pizza with sea salt and oregano, which obvi!
Now I just wait a few short minutes before the pie is finally boxed and my name is called out for pick up. I am so excited to bite into this pizza that I don't even care if I burn the roof of my mouth! Now is this what i would consider a 5 star pizza, no, but if you just want a nice personal size pizza that you can enjoy with friends or family, then this is perfect. Now the crust is very thin because it has to be to cook in such a short amount of time, but I'm often surprised by how sturdy it is. With most thin pizzas it turns out to either be a cracker or it's floppy and soggy, but somehow they've found the perfect middle. It also has that great flavor you get from a fire cooked pizza. Trust me you can taste a difference between fired, grilled and wood fired. Maybe i'm just that OCD about pizza, but I promise the crust gets a really nice flavor from being fire cooked. It's almost like a slight smokey char, but not the kind of burnt flavor you get from cooking something on a grill.
The cheese, as mentioned above, is great. It has a nice stretch when you bite into it and pull the rest of the slice away, but the flavor is nothing special. The pepperoni has "pep" as I like to say! It's not too spicy where you'll have heartburn later, but has a great kick to it and the bacon... I mean if you asked me what my favorite meat of all time is, it's bacon.
This is the kind of bacon that you kind of feel like a slob because you are picking up the little bits that fell off the pizza and sucking your fingers over kind of bacon.
You know, like the pieces are SO TINY that anyone else wouldn't bother, but you are like I'm about to lick the paper this bacon is so good bacon. It's that kind of bacon lol.
Well this ends my stream of conscious. If you made it to the end you are probably thinking this guy has a truly odd obsession with pizza. If that's the case, then I did my job. You probably would not be surprised to hear that I ate pizza EVERY SINGLE DAY when I was in college. It truly is my favorite food that I could not live without and I'm super excited to share more pizza places with those of you who are crazy enough to follow us on this blog journey. I promise that not all my posts will be as lengthy, but since this was my first I just wanted to give you the chance to understand what pizza means to me.