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Pizza Lab #8: Chinese Food Pizza
Pizza Lab is a fun theoretical column in which Meg A. and Erik S. explore their innermost passion for baking and eating pizzas. It exists purely for the sake of experimenting in the kitchen. It may not necessarily be cost-effective everytime, so don’t try this at home kids.
It’s one of the more unfortunate stereotypes in modern society that pizza is a fast food. The notion of fast food brings to mind images of maniacal corporations and mostly-plastic hamburgers which have about the same nutritional value on your body as a swift kick in the balls. Technically, fast food used to literally mean “fast” food; it was food prepared quickly, presented in a cheap, efficient fashion so as to be eaten on the run. While not all fast food is necessarily terrible and disgusting, the fast food everyone has come to know and love (and hate) is a bit of an anomaly in our civilization in how bad it is for you, and how gross it secretly is. Despite that, not all quickly-prepared food has to be awful. This brings me back to my original point, that pizza is often unfairly lumped into the same category as trashgarbage like the McRib or the Krispykreme Burger, just because it is technically a “fast food”. We all know pizza is serious business. There’s other foods that are considered fast foods, despite not really deserving the name. Our Americanized version of Chinese food is another perennial favorite of cheap slackers who don’t want to dine in, to have this dubious genre. But… what if… the two were combined into one thing?! Would time stop because of the deliciousness?! Would everyone stop eating every other source of food?!
Nah, it’s basically just a pizza crust with Sesame Chicken on it.
Chinese Food Pizza
Erik S. So looking back at our paperwork, here’s some of the comments: “Nothing special. Was too much work for just okay results. Gained nothing by being put on dough.” Those aren’t particularly positive…
Meg A. If i recall it started out okay, but then got meh as we went along.
Erik S. Yeah i think it began promising but didn’t pay off.
Meg A. Yeah…
Erik S. Hmm… what was the inspiration for this pizza anyway? Did we have anything more profound than just “pizza and chinese food are both delicious”?
Meg A. I think I originally thought of sweet and sour chicken pizza just because I’d been craving sweet and sour chicken, but we didn’t think that’d work. But we still wanted to try a chinese food pizza.
Erik S. Ah yeah, because of the flavor of sweet and sour. Though admittedly, the wannabe sesame chicken sauce I made wasn’t too compatible either. We should’ve just made sweet and sour. At least we could’ve satisfied your craving…
Pizza Lab #7: Grilled Summer Pizza
Pizza Lab is a fun theoretical column in which Meg A. and Erik S. explore their innermost passion for baking and eating pizzas. It exists purely for the sake of experimenting in the kitchen. It may not necessarily be cost-effective everytime, so don’t try this at home kids.
So plants are blooming, the sun is shining, and old people are complaining about the weather. Ah, Summer in New York. With our entry into the month of July, we start that march onward into the hot part of season. Personally I’m a fan of seasons, so even when it’s hot during the Summer, I don’t have too much of a problem, as long as I have air conditioning to retreat to. With the beautiful weather comes an array of awesome outdoorsy activities that can only be enjoyed at this time of year, such as going in the pool, playing tennis, barbecuing, and many others. So to usher in the Fourth of July, and the official, unofficial-official start of Summer, we wanted to be timely for once, and go barbecue a pizza outside. We did not want to stay inside and go quietly into the night. We’re going to survive. We’re going to live on. Today, we celebrate our Independence Day.
(Incidentally, Erik once delivered that speech verbatim to a crowd of drunken party guests as his whiskey toast to the end of the world.)
Grilled Summer Pizza
Meg A. So it seems like we just did a Pizza Lab…
Erik S. You say it like it’s a problem.
Meg A. Well, no, I’m not complaining about eating delicious pizza obviously, haha.
Erik S. Good. That would be just plain silly.
Meg A. Well we decided to try and do them a bit more frequently during the summer when I don’t have soul crushing school work taking up all my time.
Erik S. Yeah, it’s for the best. And this pizza fits that theme perfectly since it’s a Summer pizza.
Meg A. That’s true, we did set out this time to make an obligatory Summer-themed pizza. This was another pizza that involved some brainstorming, since we started with just the broad concept of “a grilled pizza.”
Erik S. Fortunately that discussion went a little shorter than the Pretzel Pizza.
Meg A. Yeah. Since it’s us we knew there’d probably be chicken on it. And I wanted to put watermelon on it since watermelon is one of the classic summer foods. Oh and grilled watermelon is also a thing.
Erik S. It is indeed a thing haha.
Meg A. A thing we will probably never try again. Haha.
Erik S. Yeahhh… but hey, Pizza Lab is all about learning and science, and at the end of the day we learned that grilled watermelon tastes a lot like grilled zucchini. Which was pretty fuckin’ weird…
Pizza Lab #6: Pretzel Pizza
Pizza Lab is a fun theoretical column in which Meg A. and Erik S. explore their innermost passion for baking and eating pizzas. It exists purely for the sake of experimenting in the kitchen. It may not necessarily be cost-effective everytime, so don’t try this at home kids.
One of my favorite tags here is the crazy crossovers tag. It’s reserved for the delightful results of worlds colliding.. Unsurprisingly, Pizza Lab uses this tag everytime just because that’s really the basic gist of the column, pizza crossovers with other foods. This edition is no different, but to me feels like a true crossover because of the nature of the experiment. Some of the previous labs have been great, but weren’t particularly outlandish with regards to the foods involved. Our Pretzel Pizza in this Pizza Lab saw two classic snack foods combine in a way we didn’t think possible. We changed things up a bit, and it felt pretty special as far as pizza experiments go. The results were certainly worth it (after a ton of work).
Pretzel Pizza
Erik S. So this was our second dessert pizza that we’ve done. It was, what do they call it? A labor of love. Or no, an enormous pain in the asshole. That’s the term I was thinking of.
Meg A. Haha yeah…
Erik S. But my God was it worth it.
Meg A. Indeed. I wish it hadn’t been so much work so we might actually make it again. I was sad when I finished the last piece because I knew more than likely it wouldn’t be made again.
Erik S. Well, never say never… but yeah, let’s never make it again, haha.
Meg A. In fairness, if we always made our own dough this pizza wouldn’t have seemed like that much more work. But we’re lazy, so yeah.
Erik S. Well, if we made our own dough, we also wouldn’t have made it through six Pizza Labs.
Meg A. This is true.
Erik S. There’s a reason we buy our dough from pizzerias.
Meg A. Yes, because we’d rather spend $3 on pre-made dough than 3 hours on making our own.
Pizza Lab #5: Thanksgiving Pizza
Pizza Lab is a fun theoretical column in which Meg A. and Erik S. explore their innermost passion for baking and eating pizzas. It exists purely for the sake of experimenting in the kitchen. It may not necessarily be cost-effective everytime, so don’t try this at home kids.
A while back on a podcast me and my friends operated, we all joked around about making a pizza for Thanksgiving. No one took it seriously. Fast-forward six months and now that pie is a reality thanks to the magic of Pizza Lab. “But Erik!”, you say, “It’s totally the beginning of freaking Summer!” you say. My reply to that is simple. Turkey is good, and gravy is magical. We shouldn’t feel guilty about partaking in such delight. So perhaps that’s the greatest merit in designing a Thanksgiving pizza, it allows you to combine all the best foods of November into one place, and not have to feel bad about doing so. Oh wait no, the greatest merit of this pizza is that it tastes fucking amazing.
Thanksgiving Pizza
Erik S. I can’t say I’ve had an overwhelming number of truly great ideas for as long as I’ve lived, but for once in my life I came up with something I could truly be proud of. It’s gonna be hard for me to top Thanksgiving Pizza. Really. That’s it, I’ve peaked at the age of 24. …I had a good run I suppose.
Meg A. It’s still better than Olympic gymnasts who peak when they’re like, 10. You had a good extra decade on them.
Erik S. Joking aside, it was a very successful pizza to say the least.
Meg A. And a nice mid-year mini-Thanksgiving to hold us out ’til the real deal. Much like Christmas in July, I think Thanksgiving in May could become a thing.
Erik S. It’s interesting to think theoretically it was several months in the making, due to the fact it required turkey meat. Somehow it took at least two month for me to select a night on which I could actually make a turkey breast despite it not being rocket science.
Meg A. Yeah, I think we were originally going to do the Thanksgiving pizza before strawberry shortcake, but didn’t have the turkey?
Erik S. Well no, I already had one turkey breast in the freezer. That’s the kicker. Just somehow, cooking a turkey went from a random dinner selection to something I ended up having to plan a week in advance.
Meg A. Well, it finally got made, so that’s the important part.
Pizza Lab #4: Strawberry Shortcake Pizza
Pizza Lab is a fun theoretical column in which Meg A. and Erik S. explore their innermost passion for baking and eating pizzas. It exists purely for the sake of experimenting in the kitchen. It may not necessarily be cost-effective everytime, so don’t try this at home kids.
After four Pizza Labs, ideally I would have liked to think our staff has reached a sort of groove, and finally come up with a method to our decision-making process involved in selecting and formulating new ideas for pizzas.
That hasn’t happened yet. Hence my use of the qualifier “ideally”.
Instead, each new edition of Pizza Lab is more thrown together than a middle school student’s Livejournal page in the year 2004. The latest one demonstrates this perfectly, reaching fruition through basically nothing more than the exclamation “Oh! Let’s make a dessert pizza!” What followed was a long debate over whether to use pudding or not. That’s really as complicated as we get. Sorry if that disappoints any budding foodologists in the audience. Know what wasn’t disappointing? This pizza.
Strawberry Shortcake Pizza
Erik S. So this was our first forray into the world of dessert pizza.
Meg A. Yep. We’ve been talking about doing a dessert pizza since starting pizza lab though. For awhile it was just kind of the abstract concept of dessert, and not a specific one though.
Erik S. Yeah, desserts is an awfully broad term, we all tend to throw it around like it means one food. i.e. “IT’S TIME FOR DESSERT!” is rarely answered with the philosophical pondering “But… what is dessert?”
Meg A. True. Until it’s time to decide on a pizza.
Erik S. Right.
Meg A. You tossed out a few ideas for what kind of dessert pizza we could do. We ultimately decided on strawberry shortcake. It made perfect sense considering that shortcake itself is a bit of a rich, doughy cake.
Erik S. Also because strawberry shortcake is my favorite type of dessert.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 