Green Options

Last week, I presented how to prepare St. Louis style pizza.  This week I present to you, the best places I can think of in St. Louis to go out and taste the real thing.

1) Imo’s Pizza.  Imo’s is probably the most well-known choice in St. Louis and rightfully so.  Imo’s has really branched out, providing plenty of locations throughout the city area, so wherever you are in city, there is never an Imo’s too far away.

Imo’s offers anything from 8 to 16 inch varieties with either St. Louis thin or think crust.  There specialty is the tangy provel cheese, which take great pride in.  This is the chain that real made the St. Louis style pizza craze what it is today.

Around the United States there are many distinct places to go for a pizza.  A couple obvious ones that come to mind are Chicago deep-dish pizza, and New York’s doughy, deep, foldable pizza.  But a new one I most recently tried and would like to share is St. Louis style pizza.

So you might be asking, what is St. Louis style pizza?  It is an extremely thin-crust pizza, so much so, that the crust is almost like a cracker base.  But its main difference is the different types of cheeses involved, a radical blend that takes mozzarella almost completely out of the recipe.

For today’s edition I thought I would introduce how to make a St. Louis style pizza as something to change up your pizza diet. However, be warned, though St. Louis style pizza has a fun, unique taste that is quite a bit out of the ordinary, it is a taste that might not go over well in a crowd full of Midwesterners or East Coasters who love their style of pizza.

(There was not much that I could find sharing information of this style of pizza here at eatdrinkbetter.com, but Kelli Best-Oliver did have a nice piece on meatless pizza, that included insights from a St. Louis restaurant owner)

“There are nine million bicycles in Beijing
That’s a fact
It’s a thing we can’t deny
Like the fact that I will love you till I die.”

Enjoy these great bicycle photos from Beijing while listening to the beautiful song by Katie Melua that starts with these lines.

This twist on classic pizza ushers in summer with a tender gluten-free crust, garlicky oven-roasted tomato sauce and the zing of fresh herbs.  You could top this with homemade mozzarella cheese or soy cheese, but what if you’re avoiding both dairy and the highly-processed soy isolates found in many cheese alternatives? Is it even possible to imagine – much less create and enjoy — a pizza without wheat and cheese?

Got local pizza delivery on speed dial? No guilty confession needed. Takeout pizza makes a quick, hot meal that pleases just about anyone in your family. But the price of convenience starts to add up – especially in today’s economy. And as fat counts seep into the cardboard and our arteries – not to mentioned unmentioned preservatives – our guilt starts kicking in. Add in the fossil fuel for those delivery cars, and we know we should be cooking up some alternatives.

Take your pizza quality up a notch while keeping money in your wallet by starting to make pizza at home. While pizza may seem complicated, with a little planning and thought, you can whip up gourmet-quality creations faster than that delivery car can pull into your driveway.

Here are some easy, cheesy starter tips:

Oh, the joys and delights of that perfect food… pizza.  Just looking at this picture is making me drool, how about you?

Takeout pizza always seems to taste better than homemade, doesn’t it?  It’s partly because of their specialty pizza ovens, but it’s mostly the excessive amounts of grease and salt.  Frozen pizzas are often full of MSG and artificial flavours.  Not to mention the potential risk of PFC’s in the boxes!

For those of us trying to save a little money, and keep our families healthy, here are a few tips on making your homemade pizzas super-yummy.

An Australian scientist has developed a new method of manufacturing solar cells using nothing more than some nail polish remover, a pizza oven and a standard inkjet printer.

The iJET technique is so easy and cheap to carry out that it could revolutionize access to solar technology in the developing world.

In a recent radio interview (audio), Nicole Kuepper, a 23 year-old PhD student at the University of New South Wales, explained the process.

I chose this stock image of an odd-shaped pizza among the thousands available for 3 reasons, 1) I didn’t have my act together to take a digital photo of my own; 2) the actual title of this one is Organic Rustic Pizza; 3) I love that it is an odd shape, which represents just how creative you can get with homemade pizza!

While we cook almost everything on the grill during the summer months (and quite often the rest of the year), we have a few rainy-day summer meals we like to fall back on. It was an extremely stormy Sunday this past weekend, so we had a pizza night, which is why you are getting the pizza post.

You don’t have to have all the home pizza making bells and whistles, but they do help. We have a wonderful wooden pizza ‘peel’, which is the giant wooden spatula thing that helps get the pizza in and out of the oven. We also have a pizza stone, which is a great cooking element that you put in the oven rather than putting the pizza directly on the rack. Pizza peels and stones aren’t very expensive.

Easy Crust

The bad news about toxic children’s products never ceases. Recently, I learned that food packaging, such as used for candy and pizza, contains toxic perfluorinated chemicals (PFCs), specifically perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluoroctanoic acid (PFOA). As a general rule of thumb, if I can’t pronounce, I don’t want my kids exposed to it! Thankfully, neither does the California legislature.

What are PFCs?

PFCs are man made chemicals used for decades to make products that resist heat, oil, stains, grease and water. They are commonly used in nonstick cookware, stain-resistant carpets and fabrics, and food packaging. PFCs are found in packaging for fast-food sandwiches, french fries, pizza, baked goods, beverages, and candy to prevent staining and grease spots. There is evidence that these dangerous chemicals migrate to food from the packaging, especially when heated. According to the Environmental Working Group, PFCs are found in over 98% of American’s blood!

The next time you’re in Minneapolis and struck with a craving for pizza, you can satisfy both your hunger and your desire to save the Earth by giving Galactic Pizza a ring.

The uptown eatery, which was recently featured on CNNMoney.com, goes to exceptional lengths to be eco-friendly. When the Minnesota weather cooperates, for instance, Galactic Pizza employees (costumed as unique superheroes) will deliver your order by electric car. The restaurant also gets its power from wind energy, sends some of its food waste to local pig farms and prints its menus on hemp.

The pizzas, too, are created with a green philosophy: many of the ingredients come from farms in Minnesota or Wisconsin, other ingredients are organic and the mozzarella comes from non-rGBH cows. Even vegans can find a menu item to their tastes, with choices including vegan mozzarella, vegan chicken and mock duck.

It Can Be Greener!For me, a big part of living green is eating a plant-based diet. My wife decided to go vegan almost 4 years ago, and after I did my fair share of whining and nay-saying, I finally joined her a few months later. We've never looked back.

Well, okay, almost never. Giving up the meat was far easier than I ever expected. Eggs? Never liked those much [...]