"Do you have your eating buddy?"

I feel that growing up as an American boy, my favorite food naturally had to be pizza.  It seems to be an unwritten law.  Birthday parties, sports team outings, the Pizza Hut BookIt club - everything was celebrated with pizza.  And yet, we never grew tired of it.  Eventually we all get older and then wimp out and give in to peer pressure since it's expected that our tastes have to become more refined... 


Oh, I like Filet Mignon! or I like the chocolate truffle strawberry cheesecake layered with dark chocolate mousse, and so on and so on...

But I honestly think that we had it all right to begin with.  Deep in the back of our minds the thing we all desire, what we really want if we were completely honest with ourselves is a good, hearty pizza with a puffed, crunchy, chewy crust and topped with gobs of stringy mozzarella cheese.  Pepperoni, sausage, extra cheese, (vegetables I don't exactly approve of but do as you see fit), stuffed crust, etc.  They transform a pizza in a way almost akin to using helium to blow up balloons instead of using your own breath.  The effect is magical - the fun factor quadruples!

The pizza can be coal-oven fired, brick-oven fired - hey, it can even be fire-fired for all I care - or any other crazy cooking gimmick the baker wants to use.  Just so long as I get to walk into that pizzeria and fill my lungs with that heavenly air laden with the sweet ambrosia of pizza-ness.

Anyways, I've always had these expectations for what a pizza is permitted to be topped with.  Perhaps it because it's the same wherever one goes.  Or, almost everywhere.  This past week, I was introduced to the pizzas as Dock Street Brewery.  I was not prepared. (oh, and as a side-note, this pizza was "hardwood fired").

 This had "Fig jam mozzarella, Gorgonzola, apple smoked bacon, and fresh herbs."

And this one had "Parma prosciutto bacon, crushed tomatoes, mozzarella, fontina, Gruyere, Gorgonzola, and parmigiano."

I know the idea of exotic-sounding toppings violates all of our kid-rules about pizza toppings, but perhaps this is a way of  unifying those two disparate drives of "pizza-want" and the misguided need for the appearance of a refined palate. 

It was a horrible tease to put a quote from Finding Nemo in my title and not to refer to it until now.  But, Dude did put it best.

The buddy system is not to be underestimated.  Wonderful things come as a result of the buddy system.  Not only does it keep you from getting run over by cars when you're crossing the street in Kindergarten, but it also doubles the Per Event Tasting Opportunity (PETO; pronounced pea-toe) - it's a technical term.

Order different, then split.

I went about this in a rather methodical manner.  One piece of fig jam pizza, one slice of the other. It was an aesthetic call for which slice I wanted to finish on.

Always need to have crust in on the godbite, and since there's bacon, that has to be in there too.  That leaves two options, the bacon chunk in the middle of the slice close to the crust or the one on the bottom edge.

Since, measuring from the outside of the slice, I always want the length of the crust and that of the cheese-covered portion to exist in what I like to call, The Golden Ratio of Pizza (that's for all you math people and engineers), I went for the bottom part.  The bacon serves as an approximate distance marker for the godbite, and it looks awesome.  But that's what the Golden Ratio does for you.  This is educated eating.