Pizza King sausage mushroom pizza is square cut with crumbly sausage and a dry flaky crust that for some reason made me crave root beer.
This was my first time having Pizza King, and I really didn't know what to expect. When you Google a place, you usually see the restaurant listing and see the front of the building, but you don't always get a close up of what the actual food looks like. Maybe that can be our contribution to the Indy pizza scene, a map with photos of the pizza for each location.
My dad says back in the day, Pizza King was one of the very first places to offer delivery. He grew up in West Lafayette and has a memory like a steel trap.
In any case, I got the sausage mushroom (my go to for new places if I'm not trying a specialty pizza), and Chris got a small pan pizza half just cheese and half some kind of ultimate pepperoni. He said he was going to blog about that so I'll stick to my sausage mushroom.
The pizza was cut into squares and on a thin, relatively dry but not in a bad way, flaky crust that from the bottom you could see some peeling which gave it a light and pleasant texture. Not all that flavorful but very nice texture as a canvas for the toppings. The sauce was relatively acidic and thin - not a lot of noticeable herbs or chunks to it, and light in color.
The mushrooms gave a nice squish feeling when biting into them, and the sausage was the star for me. The crumbly sausage on a square cut pie is a classic style for me, and maybe since my dad was talking about the olden days the pizza felt like the kind of pizza you could have ordered in the 70's like maybe not a lot has changed since then. It reminded me of Marion's Pizza in the Dayton area, and it reminded my dad of Arni's sausage pizza.
I'm pretty sure the flavor that stood out to me was fennel seed, you know those little things about the size of a grain of rice that are mixed into the sausage? Something about that flavor makes it taste nostalgic and made me crave root beer. We used to go to Marion's Pizza after summer swim meets and get sausage pizza with a pitcher of root beer. This sausage had a similar flavor and took me right back.
Maybe I'm in over my head trying to nail down the exact spice that makes a sausage taste nostalgic, but I'm pretty sure that's it, and I think it's because maybe places go super light on the fennel or don't use it as much as they did in the 80's. Who knows, but that was my experience with Pizza King.
All in all, not too filling, the cheese and sauce take a back seat to the crumbly sausage and the dry (as in not greasy) flaky thin crust.