Crusty pizza

A new pizza parlour has opened up in our neighbourhood - it is called Crust, and it is a gourmet pizza establishment. You can tell it is gourmet by the price - a large pizza is $20.

We decided to try them out the other night. Well, I decided to try them out as it has been ages since I have eaten a smoked salmon pizza. The last one was one I made myself, and I had this idea in the back of my mind that a gourmet place should be able to do a better salmon pizza than moi.

So I drove up to the shop, placed my order and sat back to watch the crew make pizza. The shop layout is quite simple - it is purely takeaway, and the counter that you order at is where they make the pizza. Two blokes stand there behind glass putting on the toppings and then it is fed into a conveyor oven. You can see the entire manufacturing process right there in front of you.

A few things stuck in my mind as I sat there on my trendy red cube watching things happen.

For starters, they had a fancy roller doo-dad for rolling out the dough. One bloke stood there and fed a lump of dough into the top and a lovely round pizza base popped out the botton. I was gobsmacked. Rolling out dough usually takes me a few minutes per base when I get the dough right, which is about 1 in 5 occasions. I don't want one - there is no room for it in our house.

The next step was smearing on the tomato sauce. One bloke was doing that, and he was really working at it. I just spoon a few blobs onto the base and whizz it around with the back of a spoon, but he was concentrating on it so hard that I figured he was a plasterer during the day. Each base was perfectly covered with an even layer of sauce by the time he was finished. When you think about it, he was wasting lots of time. When you eat a pizza, do you really care if the sauce is evenly spread?

After that, it went to the topping guys. They had lots of fancy pizzas, which you can lookup at www.crust.com.au. I watched them make a few dozen, as they were fulfilling orders that were phoned in. One that stuck in my mind was a Morocan pizza. It was topped with spicy lamb mince, and the bloke that was making it layered it on about an inch thick. Then the owner turned up, took one look at it and told the guy off for spreading it too thin! He proceeded to lay on another half inch or so. I was stunned - I think less is more when it comes to pizza, and these guys were totally into more-more-more. My salmon pizza ended up with several packets of salmon on it. It was too much - way too much. I ate half the pizza when I got home and binned the rest.

I also ordered a vegetarian, and that didn't go down well either. The vegies were shoveled on half a foot thick, and they weren't cooked very well.

They did get the crust right though - it was very good. Pity everything above the crust was such crap. Well, not crap, but certainly not worth $39 for two pizzas. I was really disappointed.

I also worked out that something was missing from the salmon pizza - sour cream. Thankfully I had some in the fridge, and that improved the pizza by about 500%. I normally also put caviar on my salmon pizza, but they weren't that fancy.

In the end, I decided that I can make over twice as many pizzas for the same money, and make them better. Which is a bugger, as it means I have to cook them from now on. No more takeaway pizza for us.