I took this photo on Tuesday for a Gathering Together Farm blog post. It was only a photo, and the pizza wasn’t mine to eat, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. This afternoon on our way to a Star Wars-Lego party at the local library, Levi and I stopped by GTF just to pick up pizzas. I ordered the mushroom/spinach, and I enjoyed every last bite. So satisfying.
Okay, I’m ready to declare…Pizza is my favorite food. Period.
I feel like pizza’s kinda gotten a bad rap lately with all the debate about school lunch nutrition and reclassifying pizza as a vegetable. It’s true that the hydrogenated cardboard stuff that they’re serving in school cafeterias deserves a nasty reputation, but GOOD pizza? I wouldn’t go so far as to say pizza is a vegetable, but real, handmade, wood-fired-oven pizza is not only delicious, but it really is pretty healthy, too.
At the present time, my two favorite localish places to eat pizza are at Gathering Together Farm (Yes, I am biased, but really, it is fabulous.) and The Bread Board in Falls City (and now a second location in Silverton).
I hardly ever leave town, but maybe I would for a great slice, so tell me, where do you go for pizza? Leave your recommendations (in Oregon or elsewhere) and fun pizza stories in the comments if you feel so inclined.
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I make most of my pizza at home! I love loading it up with all kinds of veggies and some fruits. :] I also have really enjoyed Mi Famiglia Pizzaria in Oregon City. Last time I was there I modified their Barbeque chicken pizza so it was vegan (mushrooms, carmelized onions, spinach, mango, and spicy barbeque sauce) and it was delicious.
I can probably find an excuse to make it up to Oregon City for pizza. Sounds delicious.
We make pizza at least once a week. I make the dough from scratch, but not the sauce. I can’t seem to make sauce the way we like it. So I buy some “organic” stuff from EarthFare. We top it with cheese and leftovers. Yes, leftovers. Tonight it will be leftover taco meat (with black beans!). Some times we throw on spinach or fresh basil, pineapple, pepperoni. Anything handy. It may not be the healthiest pizza out there, but we enjoy it.
Every summer, I roast a huge batch of tomatoes and peppers and then grind it up with basil, onions, garlic, and salt. Then I freeze it. It’s pretty thick stuff, so when I want to use it, I cut the roasted sauce with a jar of juicy, raw-packed tomatoes (http://waywardspark.com/?p=3190) Sometimes I’ll throw in a little rosemary or sage, and it turns out great.
I grew up in Oregon. My brother lived in Corvallis for a few years and worked at American Dream Pizza. It’s one of my favorite places to go when we visit my home state!
I used to eat at American Dream a lot when I was at OSU because it was right across the street from the geoscience building and it made a pretty good and pretty cheap lunch. Did you know that President Obama ate a piece of pizza there when he was passing through campaigning? It was kinda big news around here.
I think I heard that President Obama had dropped in there, but had forgotten. I sure miss good pizza… I married a farmer and live on the Canadian prairies and good pizza is far far away. I try to make it occasionally, but need more practice. My brother can certainly make an amazing pizza after working there for so many years, but he doesn’t live close enough to make it for me!
I bet you’ve got good wheat and good tomatoes and maybe some good dairy to make your own mozzarella. It doesn’t take much more than that. (Easier said than done.)
I love pizza. I grew up in NJ, so grew up eating NY and NJ pizza. That is real pizza! Living in TN, real pizza is nowhere to be found. We make ours at home. I just made one last night! A wood burning pizza oven built outdoors is definately in our future plans.
When I was pregnant with Levi (spring 2007), I took a trip with a friend to New York City to visit my brother and now sister in law who were living there at the time. We flew all night and didn’t get to my brother’s apartment until around noon the next day. We had hardly eating in about 18 hours of traveling, so we went out wandering around Harlem looking for somewhere to get a meal. We finally found a pizza place. Between the two of us, we ordered a “medium” pizza for something like $10, and when it came out, it was quite possibly the biggest pizza I’d ever seen in my life. The proprietor made some joking comment about us eating the whole thing, which set us on a mission to eat the whole dang thing. I think we ordered pepperoni and mushroom, and even though it seemed like the mushrooms probably came out of a can, it was truly amazing. I will remember it for the rest of my life. It was the perfect meal to start the perfect vacation (to date, my first and only trip to NYC).
My boyfriend and I live at the base of Mt. Hood but are both originally from New England. We ALWAYS go to Double Mountain in Hood River – other than that we just make our own pizza at home.
If you are ever in New England though I would STRONGLY suggest Flatbread Company in North Conway, NH. Their seating is centered around the kitchen so you can sit at your table and watch them make the pizza in the brick oven. If you’re in Boston my best friend’s father owns a vegan place called Peace O’ Pie!
Shout out to my friends who own Cafe Aria in Welches, which has the best coffee on the mountain.
For an Oregonian, I’ve spent pathetically little time in the Hood River area, so I may just have to get there sometime soonish. I don’t know when and if I’ll be in NH or Boston, but I will look these places up if I get there. Thanks for the recommendations.
I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and was inspired in many ways—one of which was to make our own pizza. (Her family did it every Friday.) I used her recipe and swapped in some wheat flour b/c I’m pre-diabetic and have to watch my bad carbs. I love it! Even my little 7-year-old loves it. We started using fresh stuff, like wilted-in-olive-oil arugula from the winter garden, and it rocked. You don’t have to have a wood-fired oven, either–although a pizza stone does make a big difference in the crust. I highly recommend the arugula with either feta or riccotta cheese (or honestly, even scoops of cottage cheese if that’s all you have on hand), garlic, and some wonderful olives… plain black will do, but kalamata will be amazing. So, I can’t recommend local places (being in Pgh., PA and all) but I say make amazing stuff at home! (Also, FYI–my son won’t touch the arugula, I’m sad to say–even putting it on pizza doesn’t make it palatable to him.)
I recently started making pizza at home occasionally. I bake it in our barbecue (of course). It’s good, and I really enjoy it, but my own pizza is not quite in the realm of REALLY GOOD pizza. I’ll have to practice more.
I’m not a huge fan of arugula, but it sounds like a good pizza topping. I’ll have to try it sometime.
The best 14 months of my life (in terms of eating) were when I worked at a tiny and AMAZING pizza restaurant in Butte, Montana. I mostly waitressed, but also made pizzas in a pinch and regularly hand mixed 25lb. containers of dough from Montana wheat. I loved that job, and it’s still hands down the best pizza I have ever had. My favorite kind is simple red sauce and mozzarella with sliced tomatoes, pepperoni, a touch of cheddar or feta and green peppers.
I’ll also never forget going an arts party in a tiny studio in a Montana ghost town where this guy had made his own brick and mortar oven in his kitchen. It was woodfired, and he asked all the guest to bring their favorite topping, and he provided the dough, mozz and sauce. Every summer I try to imitate that party at least once, and someday I would like to build an outdoor pizza oven to go with it.
And one more favorite pizza: in Italy they make this incredible thin crust pizza with olive oil base, arugula, halved cherry tomatoes and “buffala mozzarella”. Tastes like some kind of creamy goat cheese to me. That combo is seriously the best I’ve ever had. Throw some pickled mushrooms on, and it’s even better.
Ah pizza… my favorite food.
ahhhh, Butte, Montana! I live in Livingston, MT and the 2nd best pizza here is at The Second Street Bistro. The 1st has to be at my house
With 2 toddlers, who love pizza, we make our dough and love trying out different toppings. Homemade pizza is by far the best there is. And I like to think its pretty darn healthy, too.
My kids love helping to make the dough. They love pizza, too.
An earth oven is definitely in our future. I’ve been to a couple of great pizza parties at friends houses, it always struck me as a great way to entertain.
and REAL Italian pizza…I’m so jealous. I’ve never been and may never go, but eating pizza in Italy is definitely a fantasy of mine.
Glad I’ve found such a crowd of pizza lovers.
Before Mark and I moved to TZ we made Fridays our pizza night and we’d bake two large pizzas from scratch, sometimes to share with family and friends. Now that we’re here, we haven’t had the chance to make any yet…and given that there isn’t much cheese here we’ll probably do more of a vegetable-topped bread! (We make a Chicago crust…)
We love pizza and the tradition of Friday night pizza, as it is the end of the work week Such a festive way to end, cooking in the kitchen together. We’ll definitely be getting back into that groove – and very possibly with a brick oven out back as that is a real possibility here.
I have to agree with Anna that Italian pizza is the best! I loved the mushroom mozzarella combination. I haven’t tasted any pizza like it since that autumn.
If you can get milk, I bet you could make your own cheese. Mozzarella really isn’t hard. I wrote about it here: http://waywardspark.com/?p=2039, but there are millions of tutorials out there online. It’s pretty fun, too.
I always try to make some kind of dinner meal plan, but we have such a random schedule that I can’t seem to be consistant about anything. Pizza is definitely a good thing to build a ritual around, though.
I would love to make mozzarella! I have noticed your posts on your goats and I am very envious. I thought I might have a chance to keep goats here for their milk, but apparently the breeds here aren’t good for milking…! Do you know much about goats and why some would give milk and others wouldn’t? I can get cow dairy locally, but I am allergic to it, which is why I’d love to do goat cheese.
I’ve tried meal planning and have found planning the whole week overwhelming…I tend to do a few days instead. Pizza Friday, porridge and rooibos in the mornings, special breakfast at the weekends and a cake about once every week or two. We have ugali (a local staple) and beans or meat with veg three times a week. It works pretty well for us. I would love to add maybe one or two more food traditions to create that rhythm – maybe something with fruit…
Good milk goats are the product of good breeding specifically for milk production. It’s kind of like the difference between dairy cows (skinny frame with a big udder) and beef cows (broad frame with as much muscle as possible). It may be the case where you live that folks are either breeding for better meat production, or they’re breeding whatever goats they have on hand without aiming for better milk production. Even some individual dairy-breed goats are not good milkers, so if breeders aren’t working toward a goal of getting milk, it’s unlikely that they’ll end up with a milkable goat.
We love pizza too! Maybe our favorite dinner, and one we always get excited about having leftovers of. And speaking of mozzarella, I am super determined to finally make my own. We had some last night (from the store) on our pasta, and it is so delicious. I feel pretty confident I won’t have any trouble with your mozzarella post at hand and/or my cheese making book.
When we go out for pizza we go to a place called The Restobar (aka 1385), in Old Town Florence. And with outdoor seating there is a river view. If you are ever over here, I recommend it. We get the gluten free crust, which all the wheat eaters I know feel is just a tasty, or better than, the wheat crust.
I’m going to make it down to Florence one of these days…Then maybe we can have a pizza date. I’d like that.
My favorite pizza is home made on a barbecue… I make the dough from scratch. I usually make it ahead and either freeze or refrigerate it until it’s pizza day. Everyone gets their own pizza and puts whatever they want on it (my youngest likes sauce and pineapple only). It’s best when we’re camping. Either our portable Weber works better, or the atmosphere is just better when camping.
But my second favorite is Padington’s pizza in Salem. Their crust is thin and crispy and the “humdinger” piled high with stuff is to die for.