I don't eat pizza often, and not for a lack of loving
it. Who doesn't love pizza? Pizza is delicious. But as a typical salad-eating,
Diet Coke-drinking, carbs-cause-me-guilt kind of person, pizza is reserved for
the rare special occasion when I allow myself to indulge in its magnificence.
Therefore, pizza is like the good china or the fancy cocktail dress of the food
world, which you bring out only for that extra-special event or celebration. I
eat pizza for Christmas dinner, my birthday, or after running a marathon. So it
better be good.
That's a lot of pressure on a poor pizza. Because I
reserve my pizza consumption to those extreme splurge days, the pizza bar is
set awfully high. I expect that the pizza I treat myself to will be
mind-blowingly amazing, the best thing I've ever eaten, the tall glass of water
after a long pizza-less dry spell. And, naturally, most pizzas fall short, and
I end up disappointed and let down. Pizza blues.
Life is far too short to eat mediocre pizza.
Enter Talia di Napoli. This is real Italian pizza. Sure, a lot of pizza joints might make that same claim—maybe their pizza comes from an Italian recipe or an Italian tradition or even an Italian family. But Talia di Napoli pizza comes from Italy—hand-made all the way over there in Europe, packed on dry ice, and shipped directly (free shipping!) to your front door. They use all the best Italian ingredients and bake their sourdough-crusted pizzas in a "hand-built wood-fired Neapolitan oven." (Neapolitan, as in originating in Naples, and not the vanilla/chocolate/strawberry blend.) And then, the really cool, new-agey part starts. The pizza is "put to sleep in a cryogenic flash chamber." It's flash-frozen. It's frozen, and yet it's still fresh. You could say that it's just sleeping. And that's why Talia de Napoli nicknamed their pizza "The Sleeping Pizza." (In fact, they explain that Talia is actually the Italian name for Sleeping Beauty.) Once the pizza arrives at your doorstep, you unpack it and resurrect it—bring it back to life using Talia's very simple reheating instructions. It only takes about 10 minutes to "wake it up," as they say, and to have it hot and ready to eat. After all, ordering a pizza is supposed to be a quick and easy solution for a good meal—even one coming from half-way around the world.
The whole cryogenic "frozen alive and then revived"
concept is a bit reminiscent of a 1980s sci-fi thriller, but it effectively
freezes all that cheesy goodness and pizza flavor in time, so that it tastes
just as good when you get it as it would have if you'd eaten it straight from
its original Italian oven. It does
have a long way to go—"from Naples to your tables!" reads the tagline—and the
cryogenics act as a freshness time machine. If it weren't for the dry ice and
coldness in the box, you'd hardly even know it'd ever been frozen.
Talia pizzas come in several varieties, including Margherita;
plain mozzarella; Tartufina, which comes with truffles and porcini mushrooms;
and Provolina, which takes on a nice smoky flavor due to the addition of
provola cheese. Four-cheese, no-cheese, and gluten-free varieties are coming
soon. Pizzas come either as six-packs of one flavor or eight-pack pizza
assortments. Perfect for your Super Bowl snacks.
So how does it taste? Ah-MAY-zing! The cheese-to-crust
ratio is right where it should be. The crust is thick and spongy, like a piece
of fresh-baked Italian bread. And the sauce—which frankly, is often a deal-breaker
in many pizzas, due to its tendency to be bland and blah—is flavorful and zesty and deliziosa.
Yes, the few times I indulge in pizza, I want it to be
to-die-for good. And this pizza does not disappoint. This is one of the few
pizzas that has lived up to my ridiculous pizza standards and held its own
against my pizza pickiness. No matter how big the build-up, how monumental the
occasion, this pizza is worth the splurge. It's worthy of Christmas dinner. Served
on fine china. Eaten while wearing a cocktail dress. Heck, they could serve
this pizza on death row, and no one would feel shorted.
