Posts Tagged ‘pizza’

The Pizza Made of Garlic Bread

Wednesday, July 4th, 2012

Late night munchies up here in Ayarane Project. Regardless of whether you watch TV or float around the internets, chances are you’ve heard about Pizza Hut’s latest event item, the Garlic Bread Pizza. (Papa Johns also launched the Chicken Parmesan spec, which I’ll get to next week).

Parameters: this order was the Garlic Bread Pizza w/ added Sausage, plus the Creamy Chicken Alfredo because it was Tuesday (at the time) and that stuff is nomlicious.

Basically, you get a 3×3 grid of average-sized garlic bread slices, presumably buttered on both sides since the bottom is also buttered. They’re all baked together, so don’t waste any time in digging in because all the toppings traps the heat underneath and thus hastens the soggification from the combined butter and sauce. It’s about as thick as pan crust, but depending on how long you idle, not as crunchy except on the outer edges. You’re capped at 1 topping by default, and while you can add on, I would either stick to the 1 topping or, better yet, just tack on extra cheese. If I get this again before the event expires I’ll probably do that AND eliminate the sauce.

It’s… decent. About what one would expect for putting sauce and toppings on garlic bread. There really isn’t much else to say about it as a standalone pizza, but… I think this would have worked out FAR better as a side item. Trim it back to 4 slices, eliminate the sauce and either do cheese+pepperoni or extra cheese and you’ve got a winner. It would especially partner very nicely with the pasta platters in place of the breadsticks (or as a $2 upgrade, similar to the $1 cheese bread upgrade).

TL;DR: Edition: This would be a much better side item than a standalone pizza. A decent spin on would otherwise be considered a gimmick. :P

As for the pasta? Oh hell yeah, that stuff is awesomesauce. Pizza Hut is inconsistent when it comes to supplying utensils (sometimes they do, sometimes not), so bring your own fork. Or in this case, maybe a spork would be better to scrape all that alfredo sauce off the bottom. :9

The one about Cheesy Bites

Wednesday, May 30th, 2012

I think I said quite awhile back that overall Papa Johns (w/ Costco as a very close 2nd) is my all-time favorite on the pizza food chain (huh huh), but I welcome any excuse to run my mouth about this kind of pie.

This time it’s Pizza Hut’s Cheesy Bites… which is more like a side item with a pizza attached to it. For the uninformed, Pizza Hut’s “thing” is their novelty crusts– they don’t stop at the usual normal/deep dish/thin crust, but go a little farther with special types like stuffed crust (which is always available) and a rotating event item.

Cheesy Bites are a subtype of the Stuffed Crust– where the Stuffed Crust is a singular ring of crust filled with cheese, this is more of a pull-apart affair. You (usually) get a marinara dipping cup; depending on how much you dip, I would say that you’d probably need at least two, as even if you dunk conservatively you’d only have enough for about 3/4 of the puffs.

The pizza itself is similar to the one that comes with Stuffed Crust– it’s thinner than normal, but it’s not enough to be considered Thin Crust. You’re soft-capped at 1 topping before fees kick in, and I would not go above two if you’re so inclined. It’s just kind of… flimsy. Given the overall presentation, Cheesy Bites would be better off served as a side item by itself (recycle the central dough into more rolls) rather than served as a novelty pizza.

Also, as of this week, Pizza Hut rolled out P’zolo, which I’m guessing is their version of stromboli. Right away we see the one thing that’s holding these and their P’zone siblings back from true greatness– you still can’t customize the filling. I would seriously pay a dollar extra if I could choose what goes into my P’zolo/P’Zone, up to 3 items. i’d totally roll up a pepperoni/sausage variant in an instant. Yes, there’s the Meaty variants, but I’m not a fan of ham/bacon. :|

Pizza Hut needs to, like, bring back their Big New Yorker. Now THAT was a badass giant pie. It sold very well, since it stuck around for several years, and then it just… vanished. Too bad. Aside from the Big Italy and (maybe) Big Dipper, it was the only way to really get an extra-large pizza out of them. :P

Boo of the Day

Thursday, March 31st, 2011

Huh… coulda sworn I did another public post recently. Oh well. Oddly enough, this is yet ANOTHER Domino’s post.

Boy, I knew they were going to screw up eventually, but not like this! So, I had epic craving for chicken parmesan sammiches and everyone was out for the day (appointments and errands). So, time to ring up Domino’s! Well, ping them, actually.

I kinda had a bad feeling about ordering out while home alone… sometimes what happens is that mother brings home dinner without telling me and… uh, yeah, that’s awkward. Instead, it’s Domino’s that screws up: they got the pizza right (sliced sausage is, in fact, quite nomtasty), but… well, look!

What is wrong with this picture? Well, there is no sauce for one thing. (I don’t mind sauce! Really! It’s supposed to be here, as is standard for chicken parmesan-anything.) Also… ham/bacon pieces. WTF? That’s not even an option in the sandwich builder– there’s only options about sauce, chicken and cheese load. Nothing REMOTELY suggesting bacon and/or ham. Um… yeah. Sorry to say, Dominos, but this gets you Boo of the Day, and BECAUSE this is the day before Yoshi Day, you get Double Penalty.

Partial boo on me because I shoulda checked while I was accepting the delivery, but it was soooo hot out and the driver looked like he didn’t want to stand in the heat that long either. Nonetheless, I’ve filed a complaint via Dominos’ Cares (corporate support) and if you follow me on Facebook and Twitter, you’ll see I’ve made a scene up in there, too. Whether or not they refund me or give me free pizza credit, I don’t care… I can salvage the sandwiches to make them edible (it’s just a matter of plucking off the ham/bacon pieces and I’ve extra marinara modules from Jack in the Box), but that this happened at all is very much boo. I really hope this was just some weird server bug, and not, say, some employee who thought it would be funny to pull an early April Fools prank on me. >:(

This is, of course, not a Boo of the Day without the appropriate BOO THIS MAN, so without further ado…

BUT!

There is a happy, albeit totally unrelated end. As far as I knew, this Yoshi Day was going to be just epic cake and me being lazy… but I’ve gotten 3 loot notices, and one of them is supposed to hit TODAY. (Slow UPS truck is slow. I’m assuming, therefore, it is NOT a cookie bomb, since those are usually classified as time-sensitive/perishable, no?) Hardcore yay points to [info]neophoenixte, [info]brendala and [info]a_cha. :D Seriously, out of left field (and after today’s boo moment, much-needed) and awesomesauce! I promised a Skype-based unboxing for Neo’s loot as soon as he gets off work (unless I can get a Justin.TV stream going since it auto-archives…), but I’ll try to get YouTubes of the other unboxings as they come in. :D

Another post about pizza: the Domino’s conundrum

Sunday, February 27th, 2011

So some time back, I gave Domino’s another chance after a hella-long hiatus and decided that they hadn’t changed all that much from how I remember to justify that they had indeed overhauled themselves to become as awesome as their ad campaign claimed.

And it would have ended there, but then I happened upon their chicken parmesan sandwiches, and holy freaking crap those are redonkulously tasty, so much that I would forgive their otherwise “meh” pizza. I could just… only order the sandwiches but I still need a pizza fix too, so I’m trying to fine-tune their pizza into something I could actually look forward to eating. (As it stands, Costco and Papa Johns are the only ones that send me into a “DO WANT, GIVE, NOW” nom-fury at the mere thought. Especially Costco. I would give them all my pizza money forever if they had online ordering.)

Pretty much, my chief issue is with the sauce, and even there it largely depends on what crust type is used with it. (as far as toppings go, assume sausage and pepperoni, normal cheese) Hand-tossed with normal sauce is barely tolerable, so this time I tried Brooklyn w/ light sauce… which behaves like there’s no sauce at all (which is not bad but, you know, it’s okay to have SOME sauce!). Maybe next time… Brooklyn w/ normal sauce. Or I could go in a completely different direction and go Deep Dish, like I did for much of my childhood. :P

In a perfect world, I could loot the actual pizza from Costco (or Papa Johns if I had to have sausage + garlic dip), sides from Pizza Hut and chicken parmesan sandwiches from Domino’s every time I wanted this kind of feast. Doable, yes… practical in execution? Not really!

In other news: Holy crap, February’s almost over already? That means March… which means COUNTDOWN TO YOSHI DAY EPISODE 27. If we follow the rules of anime, this would mean this is the first episode of the second season. Hm…

In this post, we talk about Domino’s

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011

Domino’s Pizza. A name I’ve not heard in a long time.
I remember it was the de facto pizza store here for much of my childhood, since I don’t think Papa Johns had started building stores around here until about… 12 years ago? Anyway, it used to be that we’d get deep dish sausage+pepperoni on mondays, ’cause that’s when Father was off work.

After I moved in with mother in ’98, Domino’s kinda fell off the map. It was mostly Papa Johns and Pizza Hut. A couple years ago, Evil Stepfather used to buy up Domino’s when they did their 5-5-5 deal but that didn’t last long.

It’s not that I don’t like Domino’s– I’ve never gotten a bad pizza from them, I just found their sauce a bit much for my liking. Papa Johns got it juuuuust right in that department. SO! After quite a long hiatus, and having heard about their “overhaul,” I figured I’d give them a go, see what’s happened. Robert still stands by it, therefore…

Tonight’s experiment: X-large Brooklyn-style w/ Pepperoni, Chicken Parmesan sandwich and cheese bread.
Took a bit for the driver to get here, I’ll give him a pass since I don’t think they’ve delivered here before. :P Oddly enough, he didn’t come to the door with the goods in a sleeve… huh. Did the dood have one but took the stuff out while he was in the car? But everything was still reasonably warm, so I guess it’s okay.

Domino’s runs the Show Us Your Pizza campaign, and while it looks like they won’t show the disasters, they do… they just get posted on Facebook</a> instead. ;P They’re not currently accepting submissions but I snapped pictures all the same. (side note: oh god I can’t wait until I can get an iPhone, waaaay better picture quality than this thing)


I should have taken this out of the box. It looked a little odd. Thankfully, any fears were assuaged when I ate it. Protip: Don’t try to eat it like a sandwich, even if you cut it in half… the chicken pieces and cheese are so heavy that they fall out. XD Well, I suppose if you wrap it up in the paper it could work, but the bread is a little floppy. It is quite nomtasty, like eating a cheese+chicken pizza on french bread.


Cheese bread. Again, looks a little odd, and NOTHING like as advertised on the website (where they look like actual breadsticks) but not a dealbreaker. Taste-wise, it resembles the cheese bread that Pizza hut makes. It’s good, though I prefer the Papa Johns version.


…this is Brooklyn-style? Looks more like ordinary hand-tossed. Oh well, pizza is pizza. Omnomnom~

I like to think I remember what the original Domino’s pizzas tasted like. And… if they indeed changed the recipe, I can’t tell. They’re still as sauce-happy as ever, I see. Not bad, but not the “OMG WE CHANGED AND NOW WE’RE AWESOME” as their overhaul campaign is pushing.

Overall, I give these doods a B+, the + for the sandwich being very good despite being awkward to pick up and looking strange. I’ll be sticking to Papa Johns and Pizza Hut for the foreseeable future, barring sudden craving for chicken parmesan sandwiches.

I think, doods, I can finally answer the long-standing question as to which pizza store I prefer. While there are many local pizza providers… they don’t offer online ordering that I know of (deal-breaker, given my issues with using phones as actual phones) and often cost much more than the major chains.

Papa Johns would have to take the gold. I’ve never had a bad order from them, and their pizzas are just that solid– just the right amount of cheese and toppings, and they play well even if cold or reheated. They also get win points for bundling in the garlic cups, though I wish they’d let you choose to drop the pepperonicini (sp?) in favor of a second garlic cup. Also? Best cheese bread EVAR. Omnomnom~

Costco and Pizza Hut tie for silver, for different but equal reasons. Costco’s pizza is extreme awesomeness on par with Papa Johns, the catch being that you don’t get much selection as far as toppings goes (either cheese or pepperoni), and don’t expect to find sides there at all. Pizza Hut is awesome if you want novelty/experimental crust types (stuffed crust, cheesy bites, etc.) and they have an insane selection of side items. Also, OMG WINGS. Garlic Parmesan? Yes please!

Dominos takes the bronze. They occupied a significant portion of my youth. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just… everyone else is better. If you like sauce, they certainly don’t disappoint! And their chicken parmesan sandwiches are quite nice. But otherwise, they’re just outmatched by the above three.

And now, I finally log into WoW. Holy crap I’m late. XD