I Tried The 1-Pound Vegan Celebration Roast ...

And basically, it was like eating one of those giant meatballs they used to put in Franco-American pasta back in the day.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo___X

Although I haven't been a vegetarian in several years now, I still have something of an affinity for vegetarian meat alternatives. Pretty much anytime I go to a sushi place or one of the more hippie-ish pizzerias I opt for the tofu subs instead of the real deal, and as crazy as it may sound, I still prefer veggie hot dogs to the authentic pork and beef ones. Ironically, I think it's the semi-synthetic blandness of such foods that appeals to me. They have a very unnatural smoothness to them, but I actually kinda' dig the slightly tasteless tofu taste. It just feels like I'm eating something futuristic - artificial meat, cooked up in some sort of state of the art lab somewhere where there's probably UFOs and shit under a couple of tarps in the basement. That it's probably healthier for you in the long haul, I assure you, is merely an aside in my case. 

Which brings us to the Original Field Roast Grain Meat Co.'s Celebration Roast, the latest in a long line of special edition, extra-hearty faux-meat monoliths a'la the Tofurky Roast and the Gardein Holiday Roast. Whereas its predecessors were all about being passed off as seasonal experiences, it looks like the Original Field Roast Grain Meat Co. (henceforward referred to by the slightly more manageable acronym OFRGMC) wanted their roast to be something of an evergreen supermarket staple. For one thing, it doesn't have any sort of holiday dressings to it whatsoever. This thing would look in season just as much in April as it does in November, which, if nothing else, should guarantee it a spot next to the Smart Dogs in the barely opened vegetarian meat alternative section at your local grocer for quite some time to come. Secondly, OFRGMC didn't even bother putting the thing in some oversized shoe box like the competition. Instead, the vacuum sealed their shit in a plastic wrapper, chucked in a paper sleeve and said "eh, good enough." And that sort of marketplace minimalism/not giving a shit in general is something I just HAVE to applaud as a jaded, 30-something consumer.  

I've been meaning to give the roast a try for quite some time, but it wasn't until my local grocery store marked the price down to half what it was a couple months back that I decided to bite the (vegetarian) bullet and finally allot it a taste test. Alas, as you will soon see, that drastic markdown in price was for a fairly good reason ... 

I've always thought it was hilarious how vegans always railed against "modified foods" when vegan shit like this is pretty much the least natural shit on the planet. Just take a look at all the ingredients it took to make this thing a reality: butternut squash, apples, mushrooms, lemon juice, safflower oil and the one that really jumps out at you, Irish moss sea vegetable extract. When you're eating cross-pollinated seaweed, fungi and fruit for lunch, I think that pretty much negates you ability to complain about anybody else eating "engineered" foodstuffs, don't it?

But where things get really suspect is the nutritional data. The entire loaf is a good 1,050 calories, which would represent about half a day's worth of food for most folks. The rub there is that in 425 grams of roast, just 115 are protein. Almost three quarters of the roast is synthetic carbohydrates and fat, with the whole shebang packing a walloping 2,600 milligrams of sodium, which is about 300 more milligrams of sodium than is recommended for daily consumption. So yeah, while these guys can stake at least some claim to manufacturing a healthy meat alternative, at the same time they're also pumping your ass full of so much salt that it probably negates whatever health benefits you would've gotten from eating it in lieu of a regular old hot dog or hamburger.

The thing that really gets me, though, is how the company tells you you can eat the thing cooked or uncooked. Right off the bat that lets me know you don't really have that many volatile ingredients (meaning, anything that would probably give you botulism) in it, but then again, this stuff is put in the refrigerated section for a reason, ain't it? At my grocer, it's not even hanging out next to the cheeses, it's in one of those artificial climate control deep freezers with the ice shelves and shit. Does that mean I can just slap off the particles of supermarket snow on it, take a knife to this sumbitch and make me a sandwich right then and there? Let me tell you kids, I was tempted to make about three or four different snacks involving the myriad ways you can (purportedly) prepare this stuff. Grilled in a pan, nuked in the microwave, broiled in the oven ... hey, don't ever say the guys who made it didn't give you plenty of options on this one. 

Alright, so about that reduced price thing I was alluding to earlier. Well, as you can see here, the "enjoyment" expiration date (which I'm not entirely sure would hold up in a court of law as the same thing as a straight up expiration date) was Feb. 11, 2017. That's more than a little, uh, odd, seeing as how I bought the thing more than a month later. You think I kid? Hell, I even saved the receipt for you ...

Naturally, this leads me to believe one of two things; either there's a Kroger in metro Atlanta that doesn't give one iota of a fuck about selling foods that have been expired in excess of 30 days to its customers OR this vegan roast thingamabob is so devoid of real food ingredients that it's expiration date is merely nominal, like a Twinkie or a Chocodile. Either way ... I'm probably putting my stomach in serious jeopardy moving forward with this article. Regardless, I already paid my three dollars for it and I've already put this much effort into explaining to you good people what the roast is, so I might as well keep chugging along, shouldn't I? 

So here's your full vegan roast, after a good three minute bombardment of radiation in the microwave. You really can't tell too much from the photo, but the roast itself is insanely greasy. Except it's not really grease, it's this liquid smoke extract thing that is just all over the fucking thing. As soon as I pulled the thing out of the microwave (by the way, am I the only person who HAS to hit the eject button when there's just one second left on the countdown just to avoid hearing the timer buzzer go off?) I was immediately assailed by a scent I hadn't smelled in nearly 20 years ... the downright unmistakable scent of Franco-American pasta. You remember that shit, don't you? You know, that preservatives loaded kids stuff that sometimes came gussied up like Sonic, Waldo, or God help us, animated Louie Anderson? Well, that is PRECISELY what the scent of this thing reminded me of. Maybe it's because of that same liquid smoke additive or maybe it's because of all the preservatives used for this dish, but damn ... that smell really took me back.

Now, I could've just eaten the thing raw out of the box, but that's both gross and hardly photogenic. So, ultimately, I decided to make myself a very, very basic sandwich. There's nothing at all fancy here - just two slabs of bread, one giant translucent green tub of artificial animal meat and one butter knife I really hope is sturdy enough to do the job. Let's dig in, shall we?

I'll be honest with you kids, I have NO idea what sort of things are the inside of the roast. You can see some flakes and strips of something, but that stuff could be practically anything. Chunks of apple, mushrooms, onions, squash, like I said, anything. Overall, the product's consistency is ... well, pretty consistent, I guess, although the exterior coating of whatever the hell that stuff is supposed to be is pretty tough to saw through. If you're keen on carving up some sandwich slices, do not expect to cut off some perfectly circular in-tact pieces right out the gate - if ever, for that matter.

And there's your Celebration Roast, in its natural habitat taking a nap on a piece of Wonder Bread. As a general rule, it's pretty hard to describe what these faux meats taste like because you really can't liken their taste to any naturally-occurring meat out there, but I'll give it a try. It's a little chunkier than the Tofurky Roast and slightly spicier than the Gardein Holiday Roast, but it's also dryer than either (thanks in no small part to all that damn salt and no gravy lubricants to soak the dish in.) While the liquid smoke coating gives it a mildly tingly flavor, it doesn't really taste like barbecued anything. Remember earlier, when I said the thing smelled just like a bowl of Franco American pasta? Well, maybe it's my mind playing tricks on me, but I thought this thing tasted JUST LIKE a gigantic version of one of the meatballs you'd find in stuff like Spaghetti-Os (which, for the record, always kicked the shit out of those crappy meatballs you'd find in Chef Boyardee's competing canned pastas), right down to the soupy tomato-and-MSG aftertaste. Right then and there you KNOW whether or not that's the most appetizing thing in the world or the most disgusting - and while your mileage will almost certainly vary, this product - inadvertently, advertently, words don't mean anything anymore - gave me the gustatory sensation I've been secretly lusting after for almost 25 years. Frankly, I fucking loved it and if you think its gross or undesirable, you're probably some sort of bourgeois prick and I wouldn't have anything to do with you, anyway. 

At the end of the day, I could see most consumers getting a pretty good amount of mileage out of this thing. Right off the bat I can see its value as pizza toppings, soup and salad add-ins and pasta adornments, and it probably works just as dandy in burrito form as it does sammich style. There really aren't too many side-foods at all I can think of that this product wouldn't complement fairly nicely - you know, except for the obvious shit, like ice cream and Sour Patch Kids. And yes, even eating it as standalone meal is pretty great, just as long as you have SOMETHING on hand to counteract the deluge of sodium. Might I recommend Mae Ploy's Sweet Chili Sauce? Pour a couple of spoonfuls on your roast and it tastes JUST like a vegetarian General Tso dish at an Asian restaurant that isn't that good but you go to anyway because they're two dollars cheaper than everybody else and there's hardly ever a line. And if you think that's a backhanded compliment, congratulations on being an elitist sack of shit, you ivory-tower-dwelling, no-commiserating-with-the-common-man-and-his-economic-shortcuts motherfucker. 

So, all in all, this one gets a big thumbs up of approval from me. Although I am still confounded by one thing: just why is it called a "Celebration Roast?" Are we only supposed to eat it on special occasions? If we're feeling dejected and defeated, are we still allowed to eat it? Am I prohibited from eating it after attending a funeral or watching a sad movie or after my sports team loses a game? Or is that just the marketing agency's oh-so-clever way of working the roast into any and all holidays and special seasonal supermarket sections?

Hell, maybe just eating the thing itself constitutes a mild celebration. I mean, you are essentially eating a giant Spaghetti-Os meatball, after all - if that's not a reason to break out the confetti and slide whistles, I don't know what the fuck does.

Read More

The Gardein Holiday Roast!

Is the Canuck product the best faux-turkey veggie dinner on the market?

A few years ago, I reviewed the Tofurky roast kit. For those of you unfamiliar with the product, it’s basically a giant, frozen, vegan-friendly pseudo-turkey meal, complete with a congealed bucket of no-meat gravy mix on the side. From what I recollect, it was a fairly enjoyable meal -- probably not something hardcore carnivores would enjoy, but for those with greener palates, it was certainly a serviceable replacement dinner for the Thanksgiving season.

So, I was strolling down the frozen food section aisle of a certain big box store lately, when I saw this:

It’s called the “Gardein Holiday Roast,” and apparently, it’s a north-of-the-border riposte to the Tofurky kit. As it turns out, Gardein actually has quite a few no-meat frozen alternatives on store shelves -- I guess they’re the Canadian version of Morningstar, I take it.

Of course, the big draw here is the stuffing and the breading. As cool as the Tofurky kit was, it didn’t come in a breaded shell, which Gardein’s product proudly boasts. Nor did Tofurky’s stuffing include cranberry flakes and nuggets of wild rice, which is another huge positive for the Tofurky competitor.

As far as what the product itself is made out of, it's a real hodgepodge of organic (and not-so-organic) materials. I really like the fact that the box tells you upfront it has GMOs in it ... just because it's vegan doesn't mean it's 100 percent douchey, y'know. And nutrition-wise, it's pretty light stuff; you can eat the entire goddamn roast in one sitting, and that still leaves you with about 400 extra calories to spare for the evening.

Right out of the box, the Gardein Holiday Roast  already looks like a completely cooked meal. And yes, you're not alone in thinking "man, that thing looks like a giant hash brown," either. In terms of weight, it's probably the total overall poundage as a modest squeeze-tube of pork sausage. The box says the overall product is 40 ounces, but from my eyes, I doubt the actually roast is more than half of that  -- this thing couldn't be more than 20, 24 oz. at the absolute most.

Also included in the kit are two vaccuum-sealed pouches of frozen gravy. Combined, I reckon these two packets weight about the same as the roast itself. And feasibly, you could pummel a man unconscious with both, if you really had to, which has to be considered a bonus for the product.

You have two options in terms of preparation. You can either do things the hard way and roast this veggie sumbitch in a traditional oven for an hour or you can slightly microwave the dish first and then bake it for roughly the same amount of time it takes to watch an episode of "The Golden Girls." You also have two paths for cooking the gravy -- thawing the sauce in a bowl of boiling hot water for 15 minutes or microwaving the mixture for three minutes. Just to be contrary, me and Mrs. Internet Is In America decided to take the "easy" path with the roast and the "hard" path with the gravy ... which means in one of the "Sliders" multiverses, there's an alternate reality where we microwaved the gravy and slow cooked the fake turkey meat, I take it.

In case you were wondering, microwaving the roast for a few minutes really doesn't change the tint or hue of the dish whatsoever. To be sure, it certainly smells a little bit different, but to the untrained cornea, yeah, it still resembles the world's largest uncooked cheese stick.

Nor can I say there's too much excitement watching frozen gravy slowly transform into a more liquid state, either. I mean, yeah, it gets mushier and stuff, but like any non-molecular physicist could tell you there's a key difference between this and the stuff that came straight out of the box. Probably.

And the completely cooked roast looks like ... well, a completely uncooked roast! Although to be fair, the spices embedded in the breading definitely become a lot more pronounced after a half hour at 400 F.

And another good thing? It's really an all over golden roast, too, so you get a nice, flaky exterior all the way around the product and not just on top. And it smells really nice, too, like a giant French fried turkey

Sure enough, the finished gravy looks just like ... the moon. Or a three-day-old McDonalds milkshake. Or half a human butt cheek. But, uh, it certainly smells like the kind of flour paste we all know and love, though!

Of course, man cannot live off Canadian faux meat alone, so I strongly suggest complementing your dinner with a fine seasonal beverage -- preferably, the Thanksgiving-time-only Sierra Mist Cranberry Splash, which beats the ever-loving dog shit out of Sprite's competing ThanksBeverage, and hard.

And here's the FULL MONTY, dear readers! Indeed, the interior of the Gardein Roast looks very, very turkey-like, while the stuffing itself looks, uh, mushy. But don't let the goopy insides fool you, because this shit is really, really tasty -- in fact, I think it might be even yummier than the Tofurky original!

The cranberry flavoring is very pronounced, but I was much more impressed by the flavor of the wild rice. It's hard to keep the taste of something embedded two layers deep in chemically engineered beef and breading fresh and distinct, but I'll be several shades of darned if the Gardein Roast stuffing didn't taste like a just-boiled pot of spicy rice. Coupled with the juicy not-meat and extra chewy breading (not to mention the suprisingly authentic tasting gravy), this was actually a damned delicious offering in every sense of the word.

Obviously, the Gardein Holiday Roast is a treat for vegetarian/vegan folks who miss what good food used to taste like, but I reckon this here roast is just yummy enough to perhaps even impress a few omnivores, too. And the best part? Sans all of those pesky tryptophans, this is one turkey dinner that won't make you pass out in a bowl of macaroni noodles five minutes after ingesting it.

Read More

The Tofurky Roast & Gravy Kit!

Ever wondered what was in one of those big, green shoeboxes? Well, wonder no longer, Internet…

I’ve seen the Tofurky Roast & Gravy kit in the organic section of my local grocery store for the last three Thanksgivings, and this year, I decided to bite the proverbial, tofu-and-soy-based bullet and finally buy one of them.

As something that sort of resembles a vegetarian, there’s not a whole lot of meat-centric foods that I can say that I miss - barring pepperoni, for some inexplicable reason. In my last six meat-less years as a consumer, I really can’t say that I have said to myself “hey, you know what I miss? Turkey!” at any point in time - but seeing as how I’m a dude that obsesses over the most trivial, insignificant of consumer matters, I reckon it was only a matter of time until I plopped down my $9.99 in American dollars for some good old fashioned tofu-gobbler.

Before we move on to the set itself, I guess I need to say a few things about vegetarian-meat substitutions. I’ve tried, and for the most part, enjoyed, some of Tofurky’s other products - and rest assured, vegans, vegetarians and omnivores with REALLY out there tastes - there’s a ton of pseudo-meat on the market for you to sample and most likely abhor. On the general subject of tofu, I acknowledge that most people on the planet hate it with a passion, but what can I say? I’m a dude with rudimentary tastes, and by golly, I like its literally formless, shapeless, texture-less and for the most part, flavorless qualities. And in case you’re wondering, yes, vanilla IS my favorite ice cream flavor, too. I am THAT white bread, apparently.

In assessing Tofurky as a comprehensive product, you have to begin with the packaging itself. As you can see, it’s quite green, and comes with this really neat-looking sticker that says “100% Vegan,” because let’s face it, we all own at least one spiral notebook that could be aesthetically improved by such an adornment. The box tell us that the product is, among other things, “gourmet,” “meatless” and “delicious,” which to me, sounds just a bit cocky. The box also promises that it serves at least five people, but I don’t know - this is a pretty small box to feed that many people, and in case you forgot, goddamn, are American folks some real fatsos.

As far as the rest of the box exterior goes, you’ve got the basic stuff: ingredients, cooking directions and some photos of people that, for reasons which may never make 100 percent sense to anyone, decided to take pictures of themselves holding Tofurky kits while visiting world monuments. Yeah, you laugh now, but admit it: after a really great candy bar, you just know you’d wave that shit in front of the Sphinx, if you could.

Oh, but you don’t know how awesome this stuff is UNTIL you actually open up this thing. Even casual bystanders have at least wondered what actual Tofurky resembles, and the results do anything but disappoint.

The first thing you’ll notice is a paper insert asking you to adopt a real-life turkey. And you better believe, it gets better from there.

The insert gives you a website URL to check out and lists a few facts that are really, really hard to find scientific research behind, like the factoid that turkeys have an emotional spectrum on par with those fostered by cats and dogs and that most turkeys actually have the mental faculties to do simple fractions. Well, I may or may not have made up that last one, but if I was trying to get people to adopt birds that kind of look skinless Predators, I’d be giving the general public as many fantastical facts and figures as I could dream up.

Oh, and on the flip side of the insert? An offer for a Tofurky tee-shirt and a whopping SEVENTY FIVE CENTS off Tofurky-branded products. I like the fact that, by placing the two on literally opposite sides of the same card, the company is FORCING people to make major moral decisions between saving the lives of hideous creatures OR saving almost a dollar on vegetarian salami. I’ve heard of ethical dilemmas before, but this is ridiculous!

And I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up the “hidden” advertisements for some of Tofurky’s other products, which are printed on the tucked-in paper flaps that you can only see once the box has been opened. There’s nothing too exciting here - unless tofu ground beef and soy sausage is your idea of heart-pounding - but there does seem to be an all-faux-pepperoni pizza on sale, which I will assuredly be taste-testing at some point in 2013.

As far as the contents within the Tofurky box that contain calories (wait, do corrugated  boxes themselves contain nutritional bric-a-brac?), you’re basically getting two towers of scientifically modified food facsimiles.

The Tofurky roast itself comes wrapped in a plastic ball, about the size of a small cantaloupe. At first glance, it doesn’t look all that heavy, but once you actually lift it, you’ll realize just how hefty the dish really is. It’s not quite bowling-ball-dense, but yeah, you could potentially bludgeon someone with it, if worse came to where.

The gravy, I guess, is a little less intriguing. It’s basically just a plastic cup filled with frozen brown stuff, but once you actually microwave the stuff, you’ll detect a savory odor that, shockingly, seems to smell sort of like gravy.

The back of the box offers a couple of different recipe variations, but I’d advise you to just baste the dish in olive oil and cook as is in a nice, thick tuxedo of Reynolds Wrap. All in all, it’s not a bad wait time - about an hour and a half for a dethawed vegan-friendly butterball - so it gives you plenty of time to whip up other tantalizing entrees, like Spa-Chili and Thai Pizza, in the downtime.

And the final product, shockingly, looks kind of like a roasted turkey chunk. It ends up turning a nice light brown hue, and is stuffed to the gills with a really nice stuffing mix, that tastes just about as good as any “real” stuffing mixture I’ve ever tasted. The gravy is also pretty darned yummy, sort of comparable to the brown gravy you’ll find at KFC. As far as the side entrees go, this Tofurky roast is shockingly similar to a “normal” Thanksgiving banquet; hell, some of your non-vegan friends might even find it edible, for about five minutes, at least.

Which brings us to the Tofurky roast, as a comprehensive dish. One of my friends gave me the absolute best description of the roast’s taste when she said that it tastes just like those Salisbury steaks they used to give you in the cafeteria around Thanksgiving-time back in elementary school. I really can’t say that the Tofurky roast tastes like actual turkey, but it at least tastes like some sort of digestible, quasi-palatable meat-stuff, that, if absolutely nothing else, ought to give you nice, warm, fuzzy thoughts about being eleven again.

As a whole, the Tofurky Roast & Gravy set, surprisingly, isn’t all that bad. The gravy and stuffing is downright phenomenal, and while the roast itself may not taste exactly like a turkey, it at least has a rich, filling texture and flavor that does a good enough job aping some kind of meat as to be edible.

For omnivores, whether or not you’ll dig the dish is a 50/50, but I think most vegetarians and vegans will probably enjoy it. Hey, it’s either this, or just paper plate after paper plate of cranberry sauce, ain’t it?

BONUS TOFURKY VIDEOS! 

My official Tofurky Roast & Gravy unboxing...in high definition!

The unwrapping of a fully cooked Tofurky Roast...also in high definition!

Read More

My Attempt at Making A Homemade Pizza: A Life-Affirming Odyssey

In which I give you a PIZZA my mind…

I’ve never really given that much thought as to how important pizza is in my day-to-day life. To really illustrate the food’s significance, I went a full week without ingesting a single slice, and I seriously wondered how in the hell I was going to survive. As a peoples, we’re so dependent on pizza that it’s no longer a staple of our diets - rather, it’s more like the very binding that keeps our asses from starving.

Pizza, in a nutshell, is nature’s most perfect food. It’s the easiest, most cost-efficient means of getting all five food groups in a single meal, and it’s the kind of dish that can be endlessly altered and remixed to fit one’s desires. It’s readily available, it’s easy to store, it’s something EVERYBODY can eat (even those lowly vegans, pending you use some sort of whole-wheat bean-paste cheese alternative) and ultimately, it’s a food that’s almost impossible to mess up (as the worst pizza I’ve ever had, mind you, was still better than 75 percent of the things I’ve ever ingested.) Long story short; next to water, pizza is our species’ most vital substance, and an absolute prerequisite for any sort of social system that dare call itself a “democracy.”

You know, I’ve wanted to make my own pizza for quite awhile now. The thing is, it’s a lot harder finding decent, whole-wheat dough then you’d think, and it wasn’t until I stumbled across a certain hippie-vegetarian-indie-douche bag grocery store founded by Nazis that I found a tub of do-it-yourself pizza dough that I felt comfortable using as my base. And then, the accumulation of toppings DIDITH BEGIN.

Making a pizza is sort of like packing for vacation. You have an idea of everything you think you’re going to need, but at the end of the day, you just feel a need to cram as much stuff into your briefcase as possible. Granted, you may not KNOW why you might need a parka on that trip to Hawaii, but in case you do, it’s there. The same holds true for pizza, in a way; I’m not exactly sure why there’s a bucket of hummus and Whoppers on the ingredient list, but when the time arises…well, they’re there, I guess.

As you can see, there are quite a few ingredients at our disposal here. For all of you kids that like to recreate experiments at home, here’s an abridged list of all of the foodstuffs you will need to make your own Jimbo-style pizza:

THE ESSENTIALS

Pizza dough - as stated above, it’s a lot harder to find the good stuff than you’d think. At a certain juncture, you’re going to have to make the judgment call to choose standard flour dough or whole-wheat dough. The primary difference there? The whole-wheat stuff has a palpably sweeter taste, and it’s a LOT harder to roll than the regular material. More on that little issue, later.

Flour - because the dough just don’t magically turn itself into a flattened tortilla, you know

Olive oil - to glaze the dough at some point. You can elect to use virgin olive oil, or even extra-virgin olive oil - which I think is the kind of oil that’s never even kissed a boy yet - if you so choose. Personally, I prefer the standard (read: kinda’ slutty) oil myself.

So much cheese that you don’t know what to do with all of it - if you think you have enough cheese, trust me…you don’t. If it doesn’t hurt your arms to pick up your lode of dairy goods, then you need to haul your ass back to the local grocery store and pick up some more mozzarella.

Pizza sauce - really, anything unguent and red will work here. You can vouch for the spice-loaded, higher-priced sauce if you want, but honestly, you could pour a can of SpaghettiOs on your crust and nobody would really be able to tell the difference.

ELECTIVE MATERIALS

Banana peppers - adds a very rich, savory, and oddly, sweet texture to your cheese. An absolute must for all Greek-style, thin-crust pies.

Mushrooms - sliced portabellas will suffice, but I hear shitakes aren’t bad either.

Red onions - because white onions are just bullshit, that’s why.

Pineapples - the absolute greatest pizza topping of all-time, a statement I AM willing to go to war over if need be.

A whole tomato - so you can slice it up and put it on your pizza (and also because you can never have too much tomato in your life, ever.)

Tofurky branded Italian Sausage - for all of your vegetarian friends/liabilities. Chop it up in thin slivers, and you would never know it isn’t pepperoni. Well, until you taste it, anyway.

THE PROCESS

Step One - All right, you see that dough over there? Well, you’re going to have to break it open, roll it in flour, and shape it into something that looks like a circle. As a guy that took a Maymester astrophysics class while he had chickenpox, I can safely say this is the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life. No joke, it took me almost twenty minutes to get this stuff even remotely resembling something with a circumference, and even then, my crust ended up looking more like a Ninja Turtle than something you’d order at Papa John’s. Needless to say, after making my own pizza, I have a newfound respect and appreciation for the talents of Pizza Hut employees the world over.

Step Two - Crack open the olive oil, grab yourself a brushing utensil, and glaze the hell out of your crust. Now’s also a good time to do some last minute quality assurance, so if there are any porous spots on your dough, now’s the time to smooth them over. After that, it’s time to douse the dough in pizza sauce. You’ll probably need a brush of some kind to make things all even, so if you still have the brush laying around from the olive oil glistening, you might as well dab it in the can and save yourself the extra dish washing time.

Step Three - Make it RAIN CHEESE. If you bought the shredded stuff, just open the bag and go to town, but remember: pizza elites ALWAYS shred their own. From there, it’s up to you as to how you build your pizza pyramid. As a general rule, I advise placing your heaviest ingredients on the pie first and working your way up with the lighter materials from there. As you can see, in my test run, I did the exact opposite, making my pie top heavy with synthetic sausage and pineapple chunks while the lighter weight ingredients resided next to the crust. It didn’t destroy the pizza by any means, but it did make the pie a little (OK, a LOT) less manageable had I done it the other way around.

Step Four - Whatever extra cheese you have laying around needs to get sprinkled atop whatever toppings are gleaming and jutting from the apex of your pie. At this point, you are just about ready to jam your pizza into the oven, but because we here at THE INTERNET IS IN AMERICA pride ourselves on maximizing consumer experiences, how about taking whatever leftover toppings you have and dumping them into a salad while you’re at it? Like the noble Hopi, we firmly believe in using EVERY part of the buffalo, even if that buffalo is sometimes actually a jar of peppers.

Step Five - Bake! While the dough’s wrapper said that our pizza only needed to go for about eleven minutes, I’m pretty sure we had to wait a good half hour until our pie was completely cooked and more solid than mushy. Perhaps you’ve noticed that pizza stone there - it’s not required for the course, but it makes things a lot more manageable than they would be if we were using a metal baking sheet. Also, if you want your pizza to have a “traditional” crust, you’re going to have to shape it into the pie yourself. Apparently, that shit doesn’t arise out of sheer metaphysics, much to my chagrin.

And now, the big reveal: whether or not my Jimbo-style pizza was actually worth a hoot. While it wasn’t necessarily the best pizza I’ve ever had, for a first run through, I didn’t think it was all that bad. I made a couple of rookie mistakes here in there, but overall, it was a pretty tasty pizza that had a very distinct, almost Greek-style taste (that is, a mixture of sweet and salty, with just a hint of spiciness to it.)

Yeah, it may not be Wolfgang Puck-quality or anything, but for a home-project, it wasn’t too shabby. That, and indirectly, it taught me five incredibly important life lessons in the process:

FIVE ASTOUNDING PARALLELS BETWEEN MAKING A PIZZA AND FINDING HAPPINESS IN LIFE

1.) The world is loaded with ingredients, and it’s up to you to pick and choose what spices your life. And sometimes, the unlikeliest combinations leads to the most astonishing outcomes.

2.) It pays to follow directions, but at the end of the day, all that really matter is what you were able to dream up.

3.) All cheese may look alike, but every individual block has a distinct flavor all its own.

4.) It’s way more fun to roll dough into flour and throw banana peppers at stuff with a friend than shredding mozzarella solo.

5.) Holy hell, are your results going to vary.

Read More