Rant #1,486: Making Pizza At Home

I have often said that there is nothing like a real, honest to goodness pizza bought at a local pizza parlor.

It is hot, chewy and makes by taste buds do flip flops.

Have I ever had a parlor-bought pizza that was bad? Sure, on several occasions.

But 99 times out of 100, I will get exactly what I paid for--a great pie, great tasting cheese and sauce, and toppings if that is what I want.

The first pizza I ever had was in Greenwich Village.

I must have been five or six years old, I was with my uncle, and we went into a pizza parlor there, I had pizza, and I was hooked.

Back in the early 1960s, there wasn't a pizza parlor on every corner, and pizza was something of an exotic, ethnic food. Heck, people actually drank coffee with their pizza back then, so it was exotic, and would be so until just a few years later.

I can still taste King George Pizza, the pizza parlor from my childhood in my old neighborhood of Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York. Pizza was like 25 cents back then, so you could get two slices and a drink for under $1.

My, how times have changed.

And that gets me to making pizza at home.

Through the years, I have tried to make pizza at home.

I have tried to get the dough, stretch it out just right, put my sauce, cheese and toppings on, and cook it.

It just doesn't taste that good.

The frozen pizzas on the market are OK in a pinch, but they don't have that store bought taste.

I mean, they are frozen.

But during the past few years, I have used Boboli pizza, which basically is the dough all rolled out in a nice circle, and that is it.

You supply the sauce, the cheese, and the toppings.

There have been other such do it yourself pizzas on the market, but Boboli is the only one that actually has some taste, in my opinion.

Sure, it is not store bought, so it doesn't have that type of immaculate taste, but Boboli offers enough so that when I eat it, I feel fairly satisfied.

I have tried every type of pizza I could imagine using Boboli--pizza with toppings ranging from shrimp to bacon to onions, and so many others. They all taste OK.

My latest passion is chili pizza.

I literally open a can of chili, dump much of it on the pizza, add cheese--mozarella, of course--and put on some garlic croutons, sprinkle with a little barbecue powder, and last night, I even added some bacon bits to the mix.

It is really good, not like store bought pizza, but as a concoction I made myself, I think it passes muster.

I also recently made a pepper steak pizza, which was good, but a little less appetizing.

I simply poured a box of pepper steak over the pizza, and cooked it. Simple as that.

It was good, but I think I will stay with the chili pizza for now.

I enjoy trying different things on the Boboli pizza, and what you can try, and the concoctions you make, are endless, and what is even better, you can make the whole thing yourself in about 10 minutes in the oven.

Maybe that is why Boboli pizza, to me, is OK--you are being creative when you eat.

I like creativity, so maybe I have found my focus on food creativity in a simple, Boboli pizza.

But boy, do I yearn for a real pizza.

Boboli is good, but it still cannot compare to a real, honest to goodness store bought pizza.

But I do give it an A for effort.

It is "The Little Pizza That Could," and it almost succeeds.