Goodfella's Support Fresh Pizza - It's Official

As strong believers in the virtues of using fresh dough for making pizzas with, we bring you this heart-warming story of a large frozen pizza manufacturer sponsoring a pizza-making competition among young chefs. The story was spotted by our reader Allan in the Rye and Battle Observer. Thanks Allan

"Amateur chefs from across the South East of England recently battled it out in a bid to be crowned top pizza maker.
Seven people used their skills to create a variety of different flavoured and shaped pizzas at the regional heat of the Goodfella's La Bottega Pizza Maker of the Year Competition at the Cutting Edge Food and Wine School, Robertsbridge.

Simon Parrish from Wadhurst fought off stiff competition to make it through to the final with his creation.

Simon's winning pizza unusually didn't contain any cheese but was made just with a tasty tomato, chilli and caramelised onion sauce, topped with chorizo and rocket.

Simon won £200 to help further his cooking studies, plusa place in the grand final against five other colleges, where he will re-create his winning pizza recipe for the chance to be crowned La Bottega Pizza Maker of the Year and win an Italian cookery course.

Robertsbridge man Hugo Edwards came in third place with his creation, a square pizza cut in half, with one half savoury and the other sweet.

The savoury pizza was made with a traditional tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese stuffed crust topped with caramelised onions, parma ham and quail eggs. The sweet half was made using a butterscotch sauce, with a chocolate stuffed crust, topped with bananas and the crust sprinkled with demerara sugar.

Tanya Condon, from Battle, made her pizza in the shape of Father Christmas.

Other participants included Edward Mosley, from Bexhill, Dan Quanstron, from Eastbourne, Camilla Kruger, from East Grinstead and James Mannington, from London

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Domino's to Offer Nationwide Delivery via FedEx

ANN ARBOR, Michigan -- Domino's Pizza (DPZ) has announced that it is teaming up with Federal Express (FDX) to provide nationwide pizza delivery.

In a move expected to revolutionize the food distribution business, the pies will be assembled on-site in FedEx's Memphis distribution facility, and loaded directly on airplanes for next day delivery."The synergies of our business models are obvious," says Domino's Executive Vice President of Order Fulfillment, Ron La France. "We're emerging a new infrastructure that is changing the way we orchestrate capability."The technical challenge of delivering fresh pizza thousands of miles is daunting.

The process begins when the customer phones the service center in Bangalore India. Once an order is taken, it is forwarded to the FedEx facility in Memphis, where fresh ingredients are assembled. Next, the pizzas move along a high-speed conveyor at nearly 550 feet per minute. The uncooked pies are routed through a 1000-degree natural gas-fired oven, where they are flash cooked in a little over twenty seconds. From the oven, the system collates and packages the pies and transports them to a waiting fleet of jet airplanes. On a good day, the whole process takes about three minutes.

After arrival in the destination city, the boxes are quickly loaded onto the familiar white FedEx delivery vans, and arrive at the customer's doorstep just before lunchtime.Food engineers had to develop a whole new packaging system. Traditional insulated packaging can only maintain piping hot pizzas for five to six hours - but the shipping process can take up to eight. To keep the pizzas warm, each box contains a cesium/argon insert, which warms the content's by safe low-level radioactive decay. The inserts also have the desirable side effect of preventing food spoilage.

So far, the system has been successfully tested in Houston, Texas and Las Angeles, California. A few early problems were worked out of the system, and the company is planning to roll it out nationwide in early August. These early problem included an unexpected demand for exotic ingredients such as tamarind, saffron, and millet. "It took us a while to figure out why people were ordering these unusual ingredients," says Ron La France. "It turns out that they originated in the Bangalore call facility. Customers would call up and ask the phone reps ‘what would go good on that?' Being South Indian, they would recommend local foods they were more familiar with."

This spoof story is reprinted in good faith (I think I lifted it from The Onion).

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Kangaroo Pizza is Dished up in Australia

Well thanks to caffeineguy who is on his World Tour of Australia we finally have a picture of a Kangaroo Pizza. He described it as being very gamey - in fact too gamey - and pretty tough too. Still when you are on your gap year you have to try everything once I suppose.

Next up is Kangaroo and Emu Pizza which Uncle Tom tried in Sydney just recently. It was awesome, he says, so much so that he had to fight with his friend over the last piece! He's off to Korea next, where no doubt we will see a picture of his Labrador pizza!

And we located Jake Lloyd's offering from his Travel Blog in 2006.(From left to right): Crocodile, kangaroo and emu pizza, served at the Australian Hotel. If I had to rate them: 1, Kangaroo; 2, Emu; 3, Croc. But they were all ravishing - You must have been hungry Jake!


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Pizza Pie in the Sky - Update

There are times in the Alaska bush when even the heartiest native can't take it any more, when dried salmon, caribou rump roast and seal jerky give a person the shivers. That's when the phone starts ringing hundreds of miles away at Airport Pizza, in the old gold rush town of Nome on Alaska's West Coast

It's the dream of former bush pilot Matt Tomter. "I've flown muktuk, which is whale blubber, to gasoline, to just about anything you can imagine goes on airplanes here in Alaska," says Tomter. Now he's flying pizza. It’s delivered free — thanks to his old boss, Frontier Flying Service. "Hang on, I got pizzas for the flight," Tomter is often heard screaming as he runs out to a plane. Sometimes, it's a large sausage pie for Shishmaref, or a Canadian bacon pie for Kotzebue, or a spicy chicken for St. Lawrence Island, nearly 200 miles away.

The price: just $30 a pie, any time of year. Flying in pizza may seem like a pie in the sky idea, but it's proving really popular. An average of 10 pizzas each day goes flying out to the villages. There's even on-time delivery — as long as the planes are on time. But the plane ride is just the start. There's the lurching, bumpy ATV ride down the muddy village roads that makes ordering — and safely receiving — a pizza an adventure as big as America's largest state.

"Hey, thanks for the pizza," says loyal customer Dennis Davis. Davis and his extended family are so relieved when ordering out — way out — works. "We're just trying to bring that American dream to everyone here in the region. Own your own home. Go ahead, and get right to your education. And get pizza delivered to your house. That's pretty much how it should be," Tomter says. Even in the remotest corners of Alaska, your very own piece of the American dream is available — any way you slice it.




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Tourist Confused by Microwave Controls

In the interests of journalism I print the following.

News comes in from "Atomic Squirrel", our New Zealand correspondant that housekeeping staff at the Hermitage Hotel in Mount Cook were called to help an American guest who complained she could not get her pizza out of the microwave.

It turned out she had in fact put the pizza in the safe in her room and activated the lock!

Strange - and allegedly true!

PS - Visit their website. It looks like an amazing place to stay.

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Free Pizza Delivery- Alaskan Style - By Air

NOME, Alaska -- Last Christmas, residents of the Yupik Eskimo village of Savoonga added a special dish to their everyday fare of whale, walrus, reindeer and berries -- pizza flown in from Nome, 170 miles away.

A tiny delivery joint, Airport Pizza, had opened several months earlier, just steps from Nome's busy runways, and many of Savoonga's 700 residents were eager to try it out.

Nome's first and only pizza delivery service does a robust business in the Alaska town of 3,500.
But it really stands out for its free deliveries via commuter plane to more than a dozen other remote subarctic villages spread over a region the size of Washington state.
The village council in Savoonga, on St. Lawrence Island in the icy Bering Sea, wanted a special holiday treat for young families in the village. It ordered 50 pizzas, half topped with chicken and ranch dressing and the other half with Canadian bacon and pineapple.

Julia Noongwook, 41, said it was the first time she had tasted the popular chicken ranch pie.
"It was good," she said. "I like chicken."
'IT'S A FUN THING TO DO'

Frontier Flying Service, an intrastate airline, volunteered last year to fly the pizzas at no charge to every village on its regular flight schedule out of Nome, a Bering Sea town settled in 1899 during a gold rush.

Craig Kenmonth, general manager of Frontier, said the free delivery service helps the carrier market itself in a way that benefits customers in the largely Yupik and Inupiat Eskimo villages.


Thank you to the Chicago Sun-Times who I am sure won't mind us reprinting this article as its all done for charity.

For more information on this story click this link. I hope things haven't gone awry for Airport Pizza as their website no longer seems to load. If any of our Alaskan readers have any more information please let us know at pizzasandstuff@hotmail.co.uk

The Pizzas and Stuff blog is raising money for Special Olympics GB by bringing you the best pizza related stories from around the Web.

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Pizza Delivery Industry Crippled by Driver Absences

Our subscriber Andrew, from Lincoln, Massachussets kindly sent me this article which he discovered in an old edition of The Onion. Thanks for sending this in Andy, and its good to see that some stories never age!

"Pizza restaurants across the nation are reeling from severe delivery driver shortages following the start of this weekend's nationwide "Battle of the Bands" competition.

Members of the Columbus, OH, band Spacegoat perform during the first round of MTV's Battle of the Bands while their delivery vehicles sit unused.
The MTV-sponsored competition, which awards $250,000 and a recording contract with Geffen Records to the winning band, takes place over the next five weeks, effectively crippling the pizza delivery industry through the end of January.

"Two hundred pizzas were ordered today. I was able to fill six orders," said Bud Whitcomb, manager of Vinnie's Pizza in Columbus, OH. "Everybody's gone: Doug is the bassist for Spacegoat, Chad is the drummer for ClawJockey, Tina's the lead singer for The Dead Taybacks—the list goes on and on."
Pizza-loving consumers are reeling from the tragedy as well. "We used to order pizza every Sunday," said Chapel Hill, NC, resident Cathy Feazall. "But now, there's a five-day waiting list on a small pie with one topping, and even that may arrive cold."
"For a priority pizza that comes the same day, most places around here are asking $80," said Austin, TX, pizza lover Lew Futterman. "I just don't have that kind of money."

Amidst the pizza industry's woes, tens of thousands of hopeful musicians are working overtime to tighten their sets for the MTV competition. "I think we've got a good shot," said Ed Wallis, 20, an L.A.-area Domino's Pizza delivery driver and guitarist for Boba Fetish. "We've kind of got a ska-core/thrash sound, sort of a cross between No Doubt and Korn."

"Pizza delivery's okay for now," said Pete Grevstad of G.I. Joke. "But my future's in playing music."

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