A couple of days ago,
suzanne and I went out for pizza, and (as we often do), we ended up at Pizz'a Chicago. A small local chain of restaurants that do very good deepdish pizzas in something purporting to be a Chicago style. They have a wide range of named "specialty" pizzas, so it's fairly rare that we order by individual toppings.This time, we decided to try one that we hadn't tried before: the "Joliet Jake", which had four kinds of mushrooms (shiitake, portabella, crimini, & button), fresh basil, and bits of dried apricots.
The pizza that resulted was one of the meals that transcends ordinary meals; days later, it can only be remembered as "wow, that was a good pizza" with a touch of awe in one's voice.
It came almost completely covered in mushrooms; large chunks of various sorts almost all the way out to the crust, so that you could barely see the sauce between them. They were cooked almost a perfect amount, too -- none of the harshness of being raw, but still firm and flavorful. The apricots added just a touch of sweetness to the mix, and the basil added its note to the flavor without taking the spotlight away from the deep mushroomness of the pizza. The sauce, the cheese, the thick but not oily crust added to this to make something that was very much pizza as well as very much mushroom, and the result was a single intermingled flavor of mushroom pizza, without a single note out of place.
Wow, that was a good pizza....
