Hillside Pizza
265 Greenfield Rd.,
South Deerfield, 665-5533.
Hours: Wed.-Sat. 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Closed Sun.-Tue.
Entrées: $6.50-$13.
Cash or check only.
For several years, Bob Linder and Craig White have been peddling their “take and bake” organic pizzas to community groups to resell as fundraisers. Last fall they moved their operations to South Deerfield and opened a small pizza restaurant where, in addition to their fundraising pies, they now sell pizza by the slice, as well as fresh salads, wrap sandwiches and natural sodas.
Located at the Tibetan Stonework plaza on Rtes. 5 and 10 (the only strip mall I know with a hand-laid native stone façade), Hillside Pizza doesn’t look like your average pizza parlor. It’s sunny and cheerful, decorated with photos of flowers and potted plants, and you can enjoy your lunch or dinner at a blond wood booth set with a blooming peony or take it outside to one of the picnic tables on the patio.
Hillside Pizza also doesn’t taste like your standard parlor pie, either. The crust is made from organic white or whole-wheat flour and formed in a mechanical pizza dough press, not hand-stretched and tossed. Pies are topped with a choice of sauces including tomato, pesto and sundried tomato, a selection of organic vegetables, or free-range and preservative-free chicken, pepperoni or turkey sausage.
For me, the plain cheese slice is the true test of any pizza place. Hillside’s slice was lightly spread with a pleasingly sweet and unadulterated tomato sauce and topped generously with blistered, gooey cheese.
The slice was slightly greasy but clearly made with good quality mozzarella. The crust is its main drawback, however. Because the pies are baked in a convection oven rather than a deck oven, the thin crust is crisp like a cracker on the edges but prone to slight limpness on the bottom.
I also tried a special “priatzo” slice, with stuffed zucchini, mushrooms and garlic between two layers of crust with a little sauce, but no cheese. The vegetables might have been better grilled or sautéed first, but as they were just steamed as the pie baked, the result was rather bland for my taste.
The menu offers plenty of other healthy options that are much more appealing. A half dozen salads offer large servings of fresh lettuce and mixed baby greens with toppings like “dolphin-safe” tuna, Caesar chicken or curried chicken salad that can be meals in themselves.
Many of the salad combinations are also available as wrap sandwiches. The chicken curry wrap blends free-range chicken with currants, celery and just enough curry mayonnaise, and folds it with salad greens into a whole-wheat tortilla.
Even if you’re not trying to raise funds for a good cause, you can custom-order an unbaked pizza to cook at home. I tried a whole wheat pie topped with sweet onion and thick round slices of turkey sausage. The pizza came ready to go on an oven-safe paper tray with simple directions to bake at 400 degrees until brown, about 18 minutes. I cranked up the heat to 450 and prolonged the cooking to preclude the potential for flimsy crust. It worked, and the whole wheat seems more substantial anyway.
“Scoop and bake” cookie dough is another of Hillside’s fundraising schemes that works just as well as a time-saving treat at home. An all-natural, preservative-free tub of dough comes frozen in four varieties, including chocolate, chocolate chip and maple sugar, and makes 36 cookies for $12. I brought home a tub of chocolate chip and baked off some decent cookies that were slightly cakey, but tasted surprisingly homemade.•
