You just can’t beat cold pizza
Food writers love junk food. If you meet one of us who says they never touch it, they’re either lying or not very good at their job.
Like graphic designers who turn their noses up at Comic Sans. What font are you using for your kid’s birthday invitations? Akzidenz-Grotesk Neue?
There’s a time and place for everything and when you spend most of your nights eating fermented bunyip and swan hearts, it’s a treat to sit in front of the telly with a takeaway and tune out. My junk food of choice is dirty cold pizza. One that’s spent a night in the fridge to understand its place in life. A cold spell intensifies the pizza’s umami-ness. It gives more power to the wallops of fat and salt. The crust becomes sweeter and sauce becomes sharper. Cold pizza leaves the hot stuff for dead.
But there are rules. It has to be cheap and nasty. Naples-style margheritas are brilliant bubbling hot from the oven. A tricolore of mozzarella, tomato, and basil lapping the puffball crust. But they’re flaccid rubbish the next day. Like sugo-dipped bunting left out in the rain.
It needs to be hangover-curing shame pizza. The kind of pizza for eating in bed with the curtains closed like the monster you are. I’m talking Domino’s and Pizza Hut.
Pepperoni and Hawaiian pizzas deliver optimum deliciousness the morning after. Cold cheese pizza is fine if you’re in a pinch, but lacks the salt lick of cured meat.
Supreme will serve you well warm, but its slimy mushroom the next day will not. And those ‘‘meat lovers’’ pizzas – the ones topped with half a supermarket’s deli and consumed by jet-ski enthusiasts – should be avoided at all times and temperatures. Especially when there’s chicken involved. Chicken on a pizza is filthy.
Next-day pizza should never be microwaved either. It goes from a tasty cold treat to hot floppy mess in 15 seconds.
Hell, I don’t even own a microwave. (And, yes, I’m aware this is one of those things only said by the privileged and residents of developing nations. Like ‘‘I walk eight kilometres to work every morning’’ and ‘‘for two days each week I only eat celery’’.)
If you absolutely must warm your slice – and I beg you not to – tip the toaster on its side and create a makeshift grill.
Actually, probably don’t. No, definitely don’t. There is no way that won’t end in a house fire.