Drew v. Food X: The upper crust

If I’m going to be writing these more often, perhaps I should drop the numbering? Nevertheless, a food has cried out for blogging and I shall not deny it, even if it’s causing me to inflate the number of food review posts.

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Little Caesars’ Pretzel Crust Pizza

Our headliner tonight makes a limited return after 9 years, oddly similar to what KFC was up to just last month.

I remember liking the Velveeta-like sauce a lot more the first time around. I can’t rightly say if it’s even the same sauce after all these years. It’s also entirely possible that my increasingly decrepit body just doesn’t taste things like it used to. It’s a fine sauce; I could totally see myself using it as a dip. But there’s just too much of it on the pizza for me. Even one whole slice is kind of pushing it.

That all being said, I get why the default option is the cheese sauce. Once you get past the outer ring of crust, it’s just a normal pizza otherwise. The area where the toppings go and the entire bottom is not subject to the pretzel treatment, and is otherwise identical to a regular Little Caesars crust.

The visible part of the crust looks and tastes very well the part, though. As a guy who likes his bread pretzels, I was satisfied with the taste and texture. It even had a well-balanced application of salt.

I do think there is a lost opportunity here to use the cheese sauce as a stuffed-crust option, and have the rest of the pizza be normal. Though I may be stealing that idea from Digiorno.

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Liquid Death

It’s been out a while, but the branding was eventually going to inspire a taste test. It was only a matter of time.

While the design might evoke a malt beverage, I wholeheartedly assure you it’s water. For the pictured review units, flavored seltzer water, but I also tried their straight-up water.

What the design does deliberately evoke is what sets the product apart from others: Metal. That is to say, every other bottled water I’ve seen (regular, not seltzer) has been in plastic bottles (hence the generic term for individual servings of packaged water being “bottled”). Given my strong preference for getting soda in glass or aluminum containers rather than plastic because plastic has a noticeable effect on the flavor, the same must be true for water, right? Well, now I can find out.

The short answer is that while it certainly does taste different than water in plastic, I am ambivalent as to whether that difference makes it taste better. I know, what an anticlimax, right?

The flavored seltzers were a mixed bag as well; they didn’t quite nail my preferred level of carbonation. Severed Lime was just an awful flavor. Didn’t even finish it. I did enjoy the Mango Chainsaw, though. Perhaps even enough to go out of my way for more every now and then.

The plus in the whole endeavor is that aluminum is waaaaaay more recyclable than plastic. If that and the less-plasticy taste is worth the price premium over bottled water for you, buy with confidence.