The worst fast food idea ever? · Oct 23, 11:51 PM
With a title like that you might expect me to be taking aim at one of the usual suspects in the fast food market for yet another crazy idea. Most of them have produced some pretty far out products, notably a whole selection of off the wall stuff from McDonald’s. However it’s not a low-quality or wacky product from one of the big multinationals that’s got my goat, but a small company based in London who apparently want to ‘revolutionise’ the world of pizza delivery. They might call it a revolution, I think bastardisation might be more accurate. Clever Wally’s Raw Pizza, if you couldn’t guess from the name, deliver pizza just like any other takeaway, with the notable exception that they don’t think it would be sensible to cook it first.
Now at first Wally’s reasons for not cooking your pizza might sound pretty sensible. No more pizzas going soggy in the box. No more pizzas arriving cold. Crikey, maybe he’s actually on to something. But hold on, Wally seems to be missing the main purpose of a pizzeria. Sure the dough is important, and a pizza wouldn’t be up to much without some delicious toppings, but the most important ingredient in a good pizza isn’t something you eat, it’s the oven. Proper Neapolitan pizzas are cooked in ovens at close to 500°C, taking less than two minutes to reach perfection. A lovely crisp base topped with delicious tomato and cheese which, crucially, has been cooked quick enough not to ruin its freshness. Even if we expand our definition to include the vast range of different pizza styles that have proliferated today, almost all, with the exception of varieties that barely resemble pizza at all any more, like the Chicago style pizza, still need a professional pizza oven to cook them properly.
Now at this point I should admit that I haven’t actually bought a pizza from Clever Wally’s, or tried to cook it in my relatively pathetic oven. I have however spent many an evening up to my elbows in dough and tomatoes trying to recreate the classic pizza experience at home. My oven has been pushed past the limits of what it was ever supposed to do, filled with stones and tiles of all shapes and sizes, and generally abused in an attempt to coax out a pizza barely resembling something made professionally. The results aren’t all that bad, they’re certainly edible, but still a long way from the real thing. Although quite commendably they do recommend using a pizza stone to cook their pizzas, I have my doubts that too many of Clever Wally’s customers are going to be taking extreme measures to cook their pizza to perfection.
What really annoys me though is not that people will be cooking sub-standard pizzas for themselves at home. We’ve had frozen and fresh supermarket pizzas for a long time so that’s nothing new. What is frustrating though is the attitude to the problem. If takeaway pizzas arrive soggy or cold, the answer isn’t to bury your head in the sand and refuse to cook them in the first place. If you really wanted to improve the quality of food people are having delivered, surely investing time and money in new and innovative packaging and delivery methods would be a better choice than skipping the most important step in making it in the first place. Would you expect to go down the chippy to be served some uncooked potato pieces, a tub of batter and a fish? The equipment required to cook a pizza is at least as specialised as the fryers needed to cook that lot, if not more so.
The whole idea smacks of something that may have sounded like a great innovation after a couple of pints, but probably shouldn’t have got any further than the back of a beer mat.
— Alex
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