Mission Impossible: Find the Country’s BEST Pizza

I will be the first to admit that I’m a pizza snob.  Whoever started the saying “Sex is like pizza. Even if it’s done bad, it’s still good” clearly has not experienced much pizza.   So when the food network published “50 States, 50 Pizzas: the best slices in every state” I obviously saw it as a challenge.  I must try the pizza at all 50 of these establishments!  While my preferable method would be an actually cross-country road trip with some hungry friends, a camera and my blog, that isn’t particularly conducive with holding a full-time job… so this could take me a while.   I have yet to find pizza in the States that is better than 2Amy’s, (although one of my dearest girlfriends and her husbands insist that Mia’s has Amy’s beat…enough so to name their dog after her!) so the fact that the Food Network chose Comet Ping Pong as D.C.’s top pizza already has us off to a rocky start.

This past weekend, while visiting Baltimore for a girlfriend’s bachelorette,  I dragged Courtney and Dom to the first of fifty: Joe Squared, Maryland.

The place was empty, so we had our choice of seats amidst the funky decor.  The menu is a feat in itself– you can order one of about twenty signature pies, or create your own from an array of gourmet ingredients.  After a night out in Baltimore, none of us were in the mental state to create our own masterpiece, so after staring at the menu for a good twenty minutes, we all selected a different signature pie.

They all got ‘wows’ upon presentation.  Unfortunately for Joe, it went downhill from there, in my humble opinion.  None of them were particularly warm for starters, which may have explained why we had been sitting there for about 25 minutes (or vice versa?) Courtney’s was especially disappointing, particularly as you moved from left to right.  It tasted like any old reheated pizza.  Dom’s got points for creativity, but did nothing for me taste-wise either.  This was one of the rare occasions where my own order was my favorite thing on the table.  It was a little lacking in soppressata and a little overpowering on eggplant, but overall it wasn’t a bad pie.  If I didn’t have 49 other pizza places to try, I’d consider returning on a day that my brain was hydrated enough to create my own invention.

The subjects of my criticism may say ‘if you’re going to complain, go ahead and make it better yourself!’  Well, funny you should say so!  I actually just so happened to be making pizza from scratch for the very first time as I was starting this post!  I had watched my friend Emily make pizza dough from scratch before, but I figured she was making it look easier than it was… she has a tendency to do that.  But no, it really is quite simple.

Johanna