Pizzodyssey #3

Point of origin: Scoozi, Rundle Street
Topping: vegetarian (char-grilled mushrooms, eggplant, roasted capsicum, artichokes, diced fresh tomato and basil, plus bocconcini as an extra)

Pizzoddyssey looked like languishing for a while. I even had pizza and couldn’t be bothered reviewing it because it was it was so boring. There really wasn’t much to say about it, except that it was too salty. If pizzas were shops, this one would have been Harvey Norman. Yawn.

Finally, though, I’ve had Good Pizza. Woot! Angels sing, sun shines down from heaven, etc., etc. My Scoozi vegetarian was fresh out of their wood oven and had a perfect base. It was crisp and thin and had just the right amount of brown. The topping was spread out to the edges, leaving exactly enough crust as a handle. The tomato sauce base was good, too – not too sweet, not too acidic and a goodly lump of garlic.

As for the toppings, often if you want eggplant on pizza, it's salty. I know this, but I’m devoted to eggplant, so I’m always optimistic (with pizza, if nothing else) and continue to order it. It’s a relatively simple concept, but so few people seem to understand the need to rinse off the damned salt. Thank Ford, Scoozi understands.

The roasted capsicum was sweet, the bocconcini was mild and creamy and the whole thing had been sprinkled with fresh, shredded basil after it came out of the oven. But the real highlight of this pizza was its mushrooms. After salty eggplant, my pet pizza hate is lousy mushrooms, especially the canned variety. Scoozi used whole button mushrooms that had been marinated in something tasty before being char-grilled. I couldn’t finish the pizza, but I did pick off all the mushrooms. In fact, I probably would have been happy with an all-mushroom pizza.

Rating: 4 and a half stars.

Pizzodyssey #2

Point of origin: La Marinella
Topping: La Marinella (tomato, cheese, ham, pepperoni, mushroom, bacon, onion, fresh capscium, pineapple, olives)

Well, it's pizza time again! Mmm, smells good so far.

Hang on, what bastard decided it was a good idea to cut the crusts off? I'm not kidding - the crusts are cut off all the way around. It's been cut into a nice, neat grid, with a little throw-away border around the edge. Didn't anyone tell the cutter that eating your crusts makes your hair go curly? Or at least that it gives you a handle for the squishy bit of the pizza?

Indications so far aren't good, but it doesn't look awful, so let's take a bite, shall we? Oh, Christ. If Yoko Ono had been a pizza at the time she stole John Lennon away and killed The Beatles, she'd be this pizza. Come on, when you name a pizza after your restaurant, presumably it's the best you've got to offer, or it's your own uberpizza, right? The only person I can see liking this bastard is someone with no tastebuds. Or possibly no tongue. Or maybe a chick I used to to work with who once asked what sort of pizza we'd just had for lunch and then said, "Euww yuck! Kalamata olives! Prosciutto? What's that? Oh, yuck! Roasted capsicum! Yuck! I only like ham and pineapple!" (Really? We would never have guessed.) I think we should rename this pizza the La Yoko.

I really wish we'd thought to ask for it with no pineapple, too. Did someone add sugar? I didn't look at the menu closely and I'd forgotten how revolting pineapple can be on pizza. I used to love it, but now it just seems so wrong. Somehow it's not as bad if I'm making toasties on pitta bread or muffins, but it's just a horror on a proper pizza. Think of, say, marshmallows in beef bourgignon and you might be close. It's just Wrong (that's an Etiquette Grrls capitalisation, so please Insert Pained Look Here).

The only thing I can say for this pizza is that it's not burnt. Well, most of it isn't burnt. Bloke just held up a slightly blackened piece. The base is thin and there's about 2mm of crispness, but the rest is undercooked. The effect is something like chewing on plasticene. Bloke suggests it's akin to semi-cured silicon sealer, but since I keep away from silicon sealer, I can't really say. I suppose a fair metaphor would be partially-cooked pizza dough.

I think the worst thing about this pizza is that it has a weird red wine taste, as though someone decided to get all tricky with the tomato sauce base and add some left-over red wine. The overall effect is not dissimilar to that pizza at the end of the party onto which someone spilled stale goon.
As for the toppings, there are plenty of them, but

• ham, you say? are you sure it's not Spam?
• I can't actually see any bacon;
• the pepperoni (which the menu-writer was incapable of spelling - it has two Ps, old sport!) is only pepperoni if you're in a bizarre parallel universe where pepperoni has no pepper and Eddie McGuire isn't a wanker;
• the olives are those ugly pre-sliced, oxygen-treated, browny-black bastards that taste like nothing and have the texture of partially-tanned leather;
• the mushrooms are canned; and
• did I mention there's too much Ford-damned pineapple?

On the up-side, at least the capsicum is red. (Because remember, green cap is crap!) It's in pieces roughly the size of a fingernail paring, but it's red. Tomato sauce base - meh. Cheese - tasteless, barely identifiable as a dairy product. Overall, this was an arse pizza. It was edible, but certainly not enjoyable.

Verdict: * Yes, a single, solitary, lonely little star. I would have gone lower, but I presume that, over-sweet and red-wine-ish as it is, it couldn't be worse than Pizza Hutt, Pizza Haven or, Ford forbid, Domino's. I have to keep something in the tank to heap rubbish on pizzas of the generic and/or frozen variety, you understand. One may be the loneliest number, but it is as low as I dare go just two pizzas into the Pizzodyssey.

Pizzodyssey

Ah pizza. Toasty, cheesy goodness. It's the ultimate in lazy bastard food: you phone for it, it's delivered to the door and you can eat it straight from the box. No washing up. It's also appropriate for every meal. You can have hot for lunch or dinner and cold for breakfast. Great!* The only problem is the variation factor. Apart from the fact that most non-Asian restaurants have pizza on the menu, there are so many topping choices. Purists refuse to admit the existence of anything but the Margherita, but other people are willing to try gear like this:


Yes, there are cheeseburgers, french fries, extra ham and about half a kilo of cheese on that baby. The builders even took the trouble to brush the burger buns with extra tomato paste. I'm kind of hungry at the moment, so I have to admit, covered with cheese like that, it doesn't look that bad...

But where to find the best pizza? Everyone knows that you don't want to go near something from Haven Hut because they have as much in common with good pizza as the phrase "Mama's makin' Kanton" has in common with Iron Chef.

For example, I had a rather nasty pizza experience in Malaysia a few years ago. The pizza arrived topped with sweetcorn. Sweetcorn. Apparently seaweed was also an option, but I didn't realise that when we ordered. At the other end of the spectrum was The Best Pizza I've Ever Eaten, a fantastic seafood pizza from Nico's at Port Campbell on the Great Ocean Road. We were in town for two nights and we went back for that seafood pizza both nights. Damn, it was fine. Hello, Nico's? Can I get a delivery please? Um, yeah, we might be a little outside your delivery area...

I have had some fine pizzas here in Adelaide, of course. Manto on The Parade and La Trattoria are both to die for. But in the interests of science, I've decided to embark on a great pizza survey. I'm happy to take suggestions for places to visit and obviously I'll go to Good Life and Russell's at Willunga sooner or later. I'll even review one of the abominations on offer at Haven Hut, just for balance (and amusement value). I'll be marking out of five stars, with points for toppings, base, cheese and grease factor.

I thought I'd start with an ordinary old suburban pizza. (It was easy and I was feeling lazy.) So, here we go with Pizzodyssey #1.

Place of origin: Pizzas 4 You
Topping: With the lot, no pineapple, extra pepperoni.

Obviously this is no gourmet explosion, but it's fine for a Friday night just-crawled-home-from-the-pub sort of pizza. The base is thin and fairly crispy and it has a good base-to-topping ratio. The capsicum is a mix of red and green, which I don't usually like because green cap is crap, so to speak. But the I guess beggars can't always be choosers. They can, however, be whingers. It's pretty damned meaty, but I guess I did ask for extra pepperoni.

As for the rest of the topping, olives: whole kalamata by the look of things, not those nasty ones that have been picked green and turned black by some evil process that I don't want to try to understand; ham: it's that shredded stuff, which isn't great, but oh well; mushrooms: fresh, thinly-sliced, pretty yummy; cheese: pleasingly stretchy but fairly bland; pepperoni: it's not exactly the peppiest pepperoni in the world; sauce: a bit bland - I wouldn't mind a few herbs or some garlic; grease factor: average.

Overall: It tastes good and it has all the standard pizza elements, but I wouldn't tell anyone to cross town to get one.

Verdict: ***

* Please, please don't spam me, killjoy nutritionists. I'm telling you now, I just don't have the energy to argue. Obviously I'm not suggesting that anyone should eat pizza for every meal. In fact, I'm watching Supersize Me as I type this. I'm also extremely fond of spinach. OK? Are we good?