Ever hear the quote, "Pizza is a lot like sex. When it's good, it's really good. When it's bad, it's still pretty good"? That dictum was put to the test during a pizza contest between four local eateries.
The quote is sometimes attributed to Woody Allen, who also said, "I don't know what the question is, but the answer is sex." Allen is as obsessed about sex as a friend of mine is about pizza. That friend is Don Lesser, who moved to the Valley years ago from Queens..
Acting on his passion, Don recently decided that a pizza slice competition would be the subject of his next dining review for his column in the Daily Hampshire Gazette. I was just along for the ride. Competition was limited to area pizza places that sold by the slice, and only plain slices. Our three-week odyssey of all things saucy, cheesy and greasy would end with a best out of four. I gave myself a dispensation from my diet of all locally grown (meaning within 100 miles) food in the interest of research.
A full-blown foodie and chef, Lesser has developed exacting qualifications for pizza. The categories for competition included, but were not limited to: degree of hotness (Don's chief criterion), ability to compete in the "slide" test (the more a slice slides, the hotter it is), the piquancy of the sauce, the texture of the crust, the adherence of the sauce to the crust, cheese flavor, quality of cheese, texture, oil quality (determined by dabbing at a slice with a napkin; better oil is more easily absorbed) and, finally, taste. The competing towns were Northampton (Sam's and Pinocchio) and Hadley (Primo I).
The single contender I introduced was a dark horse. Not only was it off the beaten path (in South Deerfield), but the name Hillside Pizza speaks of the local terroir (the integrity of the soil, the quality of the plants and the care taken by the food producers) rather than the terroir of a Godfather movie. To level the playing field, I recommended adding a 'green' category to the competition, a suggestion which was immediately dismissed. Well, it was Don's game to lose.
Just to set the stage at a place where Lesser has "regular" status, we went first to Primo I. When they see him coming in, the guys put his slice in the oven and cook it up till it's blistering, burn-the-roof-of-your-mouth hot. We had a nice slice that was very hot and best in show in the slide test. At the bargain price of $2, this slice was as cheap as it was carbon-unfriendly. After Don left, Manager Fonzi was kind enough to pull the number 10 cans of sauce, a big log of mozzarella and bags of flour out for my inspection. All the ingredients came from either California or the Midwest. This would be true for all of the other places we visited, except for Hillside.
At Sam's, the slice was decent and served on a pretty yellow plate. Also there was outdoor dining. Across the street, the Antonio's slice was quite good, was reasonably priced, and had a nice, sweet sauce and superior texture. "Look how the cheese is melting and the oil glistens," Don said.
A subtlety in the surface of a slice can only be seen by close examination. If minute indentations appear in the cheese, it's a very good slice. (If an image of the Virgin Mary appears in the cheese, you're in Rome, or Springfield.) ?In addition, the Antonio's slice had enough cheese to reach the ends of the crust when you got to the last couple of bites.
Hillside Pizza is located just shy of the Butterfly Museum on Rtes. 5 and 10. During a tour of the kitchen, Lesser spied a crust roller, used for volume pie preparation. The roller is a slap in the face to the time-honored kneading and tossing in the air approach to pie prep. We agreed that the sauce, sweet and pulpy, was good and not too acidic, although the crust had a suspiciously bready quality. The cheese combination was very tasty, but there was little movement in the slide test (see upper left portion of photo).
The "special" slice we tried just because it seemed so appealing on that sunny autumn afternoon featured butternut squash (grown in the owner's garden), red onion (also grown in the owner's garden), almond pesto (from basil, grown in the owner's garden) and a slice of asiago with fried sage (local). It was delicious and we both wolfed down two pieces.
Green category points were off the charts for Hillside. Some of the cheese is local, everything in the place is recyclable, and even the trays that hold pizzas are sold to raise money—the biggest part of their business. All garbage goes to the compost that feeds the garden. Many toppings are organic and grown in the owner's two-acre plot; other veggie toppings come from Bloody Brook and Melnick Farms in Deerfield. Wholewheat crust is an option when ordering, and although the sauce and flour are not local, the cheese is a mix of mozzarella with cheddar from Cabot Cheddar, the Vermont-based co-op.
Don't disqualify my contender by relegating it to the "organic" category. At Hillside, pizza, the bargain of the century, is still there, but the politics of a new century are, too. Its?off-the-beaten-path status will be corrected in February when Hillside opens a place on Rte. 9, just shy of Primo I.
