Daily Slice gives a quick snapshot each weekday of a different slice or pie that the folks at the Serious Eats empire have enjoyed lately.
I'm just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your double-zero obsession and San Marzano snootiness frightens and confuses me. But I do know this: pizza isn't always about show-offy toppings or an oven built with bricks from the Old Country. Sometimes it's enough to have a hearty, satisfying slice with faint charring around the edges, a thinner-than-thin crust that's pleasingly floppy at the point and crackingly crisp around the handle, with loads of gooey cheese. And sometimes, it's about simply having fun with a piece of pizza bigger than your head.
Big Pie in the Sky Pizzeria was featured in an early 2009 episode of Man v. Food, when Adam Richman and a local eater famously took on an 11-pound meat pie known as the Carnivore Challenge. The strip mall pizza palace is still best known for its gargantuan portions. Check out the sizing chart they keep up front:
To see a 30-inch XL is a head-turning, you-gotta-be-kidding-me experience. (Go ahead, pull a tape measure for reference.) Thirty inches is a pants size, not a pizza size— and yet I watched half a dozen of them come out during a recent Saturday lunch hour. It's this leviathan that the individual slices are cut from. Bigger than your head, indeed.
You know what? My plain cheese slice ($3.25) was really fricking tasty. There, I said it. It's easy for all of us pizza nerds to get caught up in the recent chefification of what was, for most of us, the first food we ever loved. Watching my 5-year-old light up and attack a slice she'd never be able to finish reminded me of that. I've had fancier pizza, but I haven't had many slices that still haunt my dreams a week later. Sometimes bigger is better.
Big Pie in the Sky Pizzeria
2090 Baker Road, Kennesaw GA 30144 (map)
770-420-8883; bigpieinthesky.com
About the author: Todd Brock lives the glamorous life of a stay-at-home freelance writer in the suburbs of Atlanta. Besides being paid to eat cheeseburgers for A Hamburger Today and pizza for Slice, he's written and produced over 1,000 hours of television and is the author of Building Chicken Coops for Dummies. When he grows up, he wants to be either the starting quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys or the drummer for Hootie & the Blowfish. Or both.