So, what have you achieved during lockdown? Painted your house or written a novel? No, me neither. I did declare that I was going to wear the same pair of jeans throughout the whole of lockdown but gave up after about 7 weeks. In fairness, I had already been wearing them for a month before it started, so it was never really on the cards that I’d manage it.
But I decided that I needed a real challenge. I’m always reading about people doing juice cleanses or having an only veg month or some such shit, and I thought I could do that. By that, I mean a food-based challenge. Not only veg, obviously — I’d die. So the idea of the #JunePizzaChallenge was born. The rules? I had to eat a pizza every single day for the month of June.
Just once a day too. I wasn’t going all out like the guy in Supersize Me who ate every single meal at the Golden Arches for a month. I also didn’t bother consulting a medical expert before starting to see if my heart could potentially explode. I didn’t weigh myself either. It was obvious I would put on weight by eating pizza every day and as someone who was already overweight, I decided there was no point in depressing myself by learning the true value of my overweightness.
So, could I do it?
“Piece of piss,” you might say. Or possibly “pizza piss.”
1. I thought I’d try and open up with something shit and then build up to the ultimate pizza on Day 30, which I decided beforehand would be a Domino’s — don’t judge me. Day one was Co-op’s own four cheeses. The cheeses probably weren’t their own, but the pizza was. What I hadn’t factored in was that the Co-op have a proven track record with decent food, so it wasn’t just a margherita. It actually rivalled some of these stone-booked, wood-fired offerings you find at artisanal pizzerias. The base was crispy but not too crispy and the tomato sauce tasted better than the crap you get in a jar. In fact an actual crap in a jar is better than most bought pizza sauces. I did a quick stocktake of the cheeses. There was definitely mozzarella involved, and there were three other shades of yellow/orange, but I couldn’t identify them. No matter, it was excellent washed down in the garden with an ice cold IPA. I will doubtlessly encounter better pizzas during this challenge, but I’ll also doubtlessly encounter worse. Much worse.
2. Like this one, for instance. Goodfellas was once a respected brand, right? It was certainly a decent film, but this offering contained meat but lacked the feast aspect it promised. Salami, pepperoni and ham is a nice combo, but to be a true meat feast, I reckon you also need chicken and/or beef. The base was too thick and bready, and the tomato sauce was lacklustre. I’m also pretty sure that nobody had sliced garlic with a razor blade during its production either.
3. After a trip to Iceland to secure more pizzas, I ended up with a lot of their own-brand products. The first of these was a cheeseburger pizza. This either sounds genius or disgusting, there is no middle ground. The packaging told me that the base was “injected with sauce” or something and I wasn’t sure if that was a good idea. But it was. The sauce in question was like Big Mac sauce and the topping was mince, gherkin, tomato sauce and what I’m guessing was plastic American cheese. It was absolutely fantastic, even though it might not sound it. I know it was only day three, but this was now the one to beat.
4. Played it safe with some Chicago Town mini pizzas. Pepperoni. Probably a greater topping ratio than most other pizzas. Remember when you needed a degree in origami to fold those weird stands to put the pizzas on when microwaving them? Good times. But now, I cook them in the oven, and despite claims on the box that they take 20 minutes, 9 is enough. And what do they put in the tomato sauce? It’s like heroin. In terms of addictive effect rather than taste.
5. Iceland’s own. Was it called rustic? I can’t remember. It was rectangular anyway, perhaps a little too uniformly so. Also, the sauce and topping were way too far from the edges. Despite a mass-produced look, the base was very nice and somehow tasted like Jacob’s Cream Crackers. The sauce was great and it seemed to have real mozzarella as part of the topping, even if it was mixed with some cheaper cheese. The salami and spicy Italian sausage were excellent and it reminded me of something which costs at least five times as much at Ask Italian. What would you ask an Italian? I’d ask why they all make wild hand gestures when they talk and why the men are constantly cupping themselves. I have a ham and mushroom version of this pizza in the freezer to try later, so expect a copy and paste job on that day.
6. Stuffed crust is never wrong. This Iceland offering had a cheese stuffed crust, which is way better than those with a tomato sauce stuffed crust — what’s the point of that anyway? Not only was it cheese, but it was actual mozzarella. The topping was chicken and bacon — I can’t believe I made it to day six without having a chicken pizza. And what set this pizza apart from many others was the fact that it had barbecue sauce on it instead of tomato. Genius!
7. I promised a copy and paste job when I had another of this type of pizza, but with a different topping, so here goes:
Iceland’s own. Was it called rustic? I can’t remember. It was rectangular anyway, perhaps a little too uniformly so. Also, the sauce and topping were way too far from the edges — actually it was a little closer to the edge on this one. Despite a mass-produced look, the base was very nice and somehow tasted like Jacob’s Cream Crackers. The sauce was great and it seemed to have real mozzarella as part of the topping, even if it was mixed with some cheaper cheese. The ham and mushroom were excellent and it reminded me of something which costs at least five times as much at Ask Italian. Actually, it didn’t. While being tasty, just six small quarter-circles of ham and a Jeremy Beadle handful (not the good hand) of mushrooms was far from generous. It seems that salami and Italian sausage — even though salami technically IS an Italian sausage — are cheaper commodities than good old British ham and mushroom. And what were the small, intermittent dollops of white sauce for? They seemed to serve no purpose in that they tasted of nothing. Still, it was an acceptable pizza, but won’t trouble the medal positions at the end of the month.
8. I could do another copy and paste job here, because today’s pizza was the same as that on the 6th day, but with a different topping. It was a BBQ meat feat. I’m not a fan of abbreviating barbecue to BBQ, but the pizza was excellent. It included ham, pepperoni and minced beef, so it could more legitimately call itself a meat feast than the Goodfellas abomination (still the worst pizza I’ve tasted during this challenge and unlikely to be beaten), but some chicken would have been nice too. Barbecue sauce on a pizza is excellent and I’d like to see more of this alternative sauce kind of thing happening. It has to be said that Iceland have given a very good account of themselves, pizza-wise, so far. I will need to go back there soon and see if they have any pizzas I missed on my first visit.
9. Imagine starting a pizza company and calling that pizza company The Pizza Company. That’s what The Pizza Company did. Imaginative. Anyway, their Meat Metropolis was on tonight’s menu. It sounds like a city that would smell particularly bad in the summer, but as a pizza it was pretty good. I overcooked it slightly, so the slightly crispy base was entirely my own fault. The topping of pepperoni, Cumberland sausage, meatballs, beef and bacon was something to rival Domino’s — perhaps the Meateor, or We’ll Meat Again or whatever other meat-based puns they use. One criticism though is there was too little cheese and what was there wasn’t particularly good cheese. I used The Pizza Company’s pizza dressing with it which helped. And there was one of their American cheesecakes for dessert too, which was excellent. This was the most uncomfortably full I’ve been at any point of this challenge, but I can’t blame anyone else other than myself for that.
10. Due to the heavy bread content of this challenge — not helped by the fact that I’d eaten hotdogs two days in a row for my lunch — shitting was starting to become a bit difficult by this point. Anyway, from out door to in door, today’s pizza was two small Chicago Town four cheeses efforts. Safe.
11. Pizza Express became famous in recent times for being the place Prince Andrew went with his daughters at the time that someone younger than said daughters claimed he was having underage, non-consensual sex with them. The pizzas they sell for home cooking are way worse than what you get in their restaurants, something of which I was previously unaware. The pollo ad astra was my choice tonight. There were six pieces of chicken on a below-average base. There was little cheese and the sauce did not go anywhere near close enough to the edge. It even had a very scant amount of peppers on it. Easily the biggest disappointment of the challenge so far. In a nod to Randrew Andrew, to give him his full nickname, I might claim I was somewhere else tonight and not admit to having eaten this.
12. Fruit on pizza is a bone of contention. I had my first Hawaiian in years tonight and it was perfectly fine. It was a Co-op pizza, so I had high hopes — chilled rather than frozen though. It was supposed to take 8–10 minutes at 200 degrees in a fan oven. I cooked it for just under 8 and it was burnt. The thin and crispy base was a little too crispy, but it was still good. I must say though that Co-op frozen pizzas are far superior to their chilled ones, based on my experience so far in the challenge.
13. Further testing my Co-op chilled vs. frozen theory, today’s pizza was another chilled Co-op effort. This time it was double pepperoni, boasting “two kinds of pepperoni”, as the name suggested. The two types were large circles and small circles, both tasting exactly the same. That’s not a criticism really. Lots of meat on a pizza is never wrong. I didn’t burn it either, realising my mistake of cooking it at 200 the day before, when the correct temperature was actually 180 for a fan oven. Oops!
14. For the third time on this challenge, I ventured to Chicago Town. Although isn’t Chicago really a city? Anyway, I procured a twin pack of small Chicken Club pizzas. The first rule of chicken club was obviously to make sure all pieces of chicken were exactly the same size in perfect cubes. Said chicken cubes didn’t really taste very chicken-like or, in fact, of anything. A total disappointment.
15. Back to the Co-op tonight for a frozen chilli chicken pizza. The frozen ones are better than the chilled ones. There’s no logical explanation for this, as they seem to be more or less the exact same type of pizza. Maybe it’s our oven? Anyway, this was excellent. The chicken looked and tasted like chicken and, unlike with Pizza Express, there was plenty of it, because the Co-op don’t think chicken is as valuable as diamonds. The sauce was interesting here too. It wasn’t tomato and tasted a bit like that Blue Dragon sweet chilli sauce, but you couldn’t use that in place of pizza sauce, could you? They might have. A strong contender for a medal position.
16. What is it about New York that makes British companies want to name their pizzas after it? It makes me think of Frank Sinatra, a liar who suggested that he was a New York type when he was in fact from the tyre fires of Hoboken. This keeps with the great tradition of American singers who cannot tell the truth. Barry Manilow, for instance, didn’t write his hit song I Write the Songs himself. Mind blown. However, John Denver definitely left on a jet plane. Anyway, this pizza contained salami, ham and some kind of sliced sausage. It was very good, but would you eat it in the back of a yellow cab and describe it as “poifect”? Probably not.
17. An old favourite of mine, the Chicago Town Loaded Pepperoni, was next. This is a full size pizza and boasts a tomato sauce stuffed crust, although that’s basically just a slightly larger base with the edge curled over. I know I slagged off tomato sauce stuffed crust earlier, but that is not the reason this pizza is so tasty. It’s all about the base, as some pop singer type once claimed. The heroin-like sauce and lashings of meat don’t do any harm either. However, I experienced an oven disaster with this. Like most pizzas, the cooking instructions for this told me to place the pizza directly on the oven shelf. I did so. I checked its cooking progress to find that it had split and was flopping between the bars of the shelf, like a Salvador Dali clock. It was salvaged, but didn’t look that great. I don’t believe in that “the first bite is with the eye” thing because I don’t want to burn my retinas with molten sauce or gouge out my eyeball with crispy base. It was washed down with a mojito, which is very acceptable.
18. Another chilli chicken pizza. This time from Tesco. It was identical in every way to the Co-op version, apart from that it didn’t taste anywhere near as good.
19. And so onwards to Lidl. An artisanal pizza from their Deluxe brand containing spinach, caramelised onion, sundried tomatoes and Spanish chorizo. Is there any other kind of chorizo? It’s like saying Indian korma, German bratwurst or Portuguese breakfast (don’t look that up on the old Urban Dictionary). It was also on a sourdough base, so it was the most hipster pizza of the challenge so far. And the verdict? It wasn’t bad, but the Deluxe name was something of a misnomer in this case. I would have preferred chunks of chorizo rather than the wafer-thin salami type that was used. And there were only about eight slices of it. At least I got to wash it down with a couple of orange IPAs — further proof of the gentrification of budget supermarkets.
20. Chicago Town pizza subs. Now THIS is the worst kind of Chicago Town pizza. It’s just a slightly more up to date version of the old French bread pizza, which was a real pain — see what I did there? Anyway, it was unimaginative and lacked decent flavour. A very disappointing experience. They give Chicago a bad name. You couldn’t imagine 1920s gangsters with their violin cases containing machine guns, standing on the running boards of cars on their way to eat these atrocities. Thankfully, I ate them for lunch because I was going to a socially distanced garden dinner later, so my evening wasn’t ruined by them.
21. Lidl’s Cajun chicken. It looked OK and it tasted OK, but there seemed to be no spice on it. Fairly dull and drab, to be honest. The most interesting thing I can say about this is that when I was younger, I thought Cajun was pronounced “Ca-joon”.
22. And now for something completely different. No, not a Monty Python pizza, but a homemade one. Yes, that’s right. It would be foolish to complete a month-long pizza challenge without having one which was 100% guaranteed to be something I really liked. So, homemade base and sauce, topped with grated red Leicester and sliced mozzarella, onion, tuna and prawns it was. And I folded it to make the challenge’s only calzone. This pizza was frankly fucking excellent. It was so immense that I only manged to eat around 2/3 of it, meaning that day 23 would involve pizza for both lunch and dinner.
23. Leftover calzone for lunch. No complaints. There was another leftover pizza for tea. A cheese and mushroom one had been made the previous day too, but I didn’t eat it then. Obviously, because I’m not that fat a bastard (although I was getting there by this point). So, pizza twice in one day, and two different homemade ones. This one eaten together with some of Iceland’s hash brown fries. #winning
24. It was all downhill after this. The perfect time to sample a frozen all-cheese affair from Lidl that cost only 85p then. It was like someone had made a pizza having only ever seen a photo of a pizza. The base was like a giant scone and the cheese didn’t melt like cheese should, suggesting it wasn’t actual cheese. What it was I don’t know. I wouldn’t inflict this pizza on my worst enemy. And yet, it still wasn’t as bad as the Goodfellas one I had on day two.
25. The same brand today, but it was a meat feast type thing and it didn’t have the stupidly thick base of the cheese one. It was a chalk and cheese situation, and by that, I don’t mean this pizza contained chalk. Just some nondescript meat. Actually, the sausage was pretty good and it really made this pizza. Streets ahead of the previous day’s pizza, but it won’t be getting anywhere near a podium finish.
26. Scouring Tesco for yet another pizza, I stumbled upon a Tesco Finest ham, mushroom and mascarpone effort. It was £4.50, about the price you’d expect for a supermarket hipster option. However, it went out of date that day, so it was reduced to £2.92. That’s more like it. The mascarpone didn’t really seem to melt, but it was hot enough that it could have melted your face so you ended up looking like that Nazi in the Indiana Jones film. The mushrooms were a bit slimy too. Not Tesco’s Finest hour, but we are talking about a company that lied about its total revenue a few years back to impress shareholders, so perhaps it’s a bit much to ever expect anything from these shysters. I should probably stick an ‘allegedly’ somewhere in there for legal reasons, if that ever actually helps in libel cases.
27. I had been looking forward to this one ever since I’d bought it. It was an Iceland cheese pizza — bear with me here, because “just cheese” pizzas can be good too. It was the same style as the cheeseburger pizza from weeks ago, the pizza which is still the one to beat. Instead of burger sauce, this had a base full of cheese sauce. But, the reality was it was absolutely shocking. So much cheese and so little taste. And the base was shit too.
28. Iceland again, but a different style of pizza. This was a thin and crispy — and it was the thinnest, crispiest, most credit card-like pizza I’d ever seen — and the topping was spicy pepperoni. I’ve never eaten so much pepperoni in my life as in the last month, as your mum once said, etc. This was actually surprisingly good. It wasn’t particularly spicy, but it tasted a little bit like my favourite condiment, bacon jam. This challenge keeps throwing up surprises. Throwing up is something I’ve not done during this challenge either.
29. An emotional day. The last of the shop-bought pizzas. What better for the occasion then than a Chicago Town tomato stuffed crust offering? And not a repeat of the Loaded Pepperoni either. Although pepperoni was present. With ham and mushroom. It was called a Manhattan Meaty. Yep, ham, pepperoni and mushroom doesn’t evoke images of one of the world’s most iconic skylines, but you could probably trick a Native American into selling you this pizza for $1 if you were so inclined. Anyway, it was an excellent finish to shop bought pizzas.
30. “But there’s still a day left”, you might be saying, if you haven’t lost the will to live by this point. Yes, but I decided to go out on the biggest pizza high possible. How so? Domino’s, that’s bloody how. I ordered online for delivery, despite living only a four-minute walk from my local outlet. Even though I’m a semi-regular home delivery customer who lives so close, every single time, without fail, the driver phones me because he can’t find the house. I must point out that it’s not always the same driver.
Anyway, and I’m sorry if you follow me on Instagram because I already made this joke there, I went for Beyonce’s favourite pizza, the Meatilicious. I didn’t just order this in order to make a shit joke (although that would certainly be a valid reason), but because I like pepperoni, ham, sausage and chicken thrown together like a writhing meat orgy. I also went for a small garlic pizza bread, because it’s practically illegal not to, along with some chicken strippers and some cookies which were definitely not worth just over a pound each.
This was a fitting end to the challenge and also ensured that the start of July would also involve pizza, as there was more than enough left over for a breakfast/brunch/lunch situation.
So, who were the winners and losers of this challenge? I would say to start off with that I’m probably both: a winner in the sense that I got to eat pizza every day for a month and a loser in the sense that none of my clothes fit me anymore.
When it comes to the pizzas, I think it would be unfair to include Domino’s, which I knew from the start would kick the collective arses of all frozen and chilled counterparts. If pizzas had arses. It would also be unfair to include the homemade offerings as these had by far the highest topping-to-base ratio because I’m a greedy bastard.
So, the medallists are:
Gold. Iceland Cheeseburger. This was the greatest topping and the sauce in the base was absolute genius.
Silver. Chicago Town. It has to be one of the larger pizzas with the rising base and tomato stuffed crust (despite previous negative comments about this). Manhattan Meaty gets the nod over Loaded Pepperoni due to the fact that it induced greater meat sweats.
Bronze. Co-op Chilli Chicken. Perhaps a surprise to see one of the cheapest pizzas on the list make the grade, but it had some of the best ingredients and the most genius of sauces and it pissed all over the same thing from Tesco.
And the losers?
It’s between the Goodfellas atrocity and that cheap cheese one from Lidl. However, as Lidl redeemed themselves with other, superior pizzas, it has to be Goodfellas. The base was like a massive stottie and the topping was like Plasticine. Absolute rubbish.
Now I’m off to wean myself off pizza. Possibly by sticking a small slice to my arm. The not-eating-pizza-at-all challenge of July will be much harder. Perhaps I’ll do pies next time?
