Matching Pop With Sausage Pizza: Pepsi is the Best Choice

2008-12-03T20:23:00.000-08:00

Matching Pop With Sausage Pizza
Pepsi is the Best Choice
by Anthony Trendl

Much has been said, and should be said, about matching wine with a meal. As any sommelier will tell you, the epicurean mind needs to think beyond "reds for red meat, whites for white meat." I am no sommelier, and have nothing to offer you here. Consult Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide, 7th Edition: The Complete, Easy-to-Use Reference on Recent Vintages, Prices, and Ratings for More than 8,000 Wines from All ... Wine Regions (Parker's Wine Buyer's Guide).

However, as an aficionado of pizza, with a speciality in sausage pizza, I submit there is something important to match. Rarely properly married is pizza with pop.

Let's skip Domino's Pizza for a moment. Let that moment last forever. Clearly, if this is your choice, you have skipped past consideration of your palate. Move on. Nothing for you here. Take your insipid, limp cheap bread and sauce excuse of all that is good with you.

Instead, the cultured man's pizza is made with real meat, real tomatoes. I like deep dish, but that is still a regional pleasure, so I'll focus on a more national favorite. This is about a thin pie, crusty and crispy, wood oven baked if you can get it. It has a sweet marinara sauce just below a mozzarella skin mixed in with Italian sausage pieces -- genuine pork sausage with overtones of fennel coming right at you.

Pepsi. Not Diet Pepsi. The regular stuff. No after bite like any of Coke's cola products. Not too sweet, like a root beer with a vanilla tint, not too fruity like a Mountain Dew or Orange Crush. Dr. Pepper loses out because the cherry flavor crosses too close to the medicine line. RC Cola, though the flavor is acceptable, has a higher carbonation level. Too many bubbles.

Get in the Pepsi line.

What the diner wants is a pop with enough of an acid bite, and flavors that linger long enough, but never overtake the intensity of the next greasy bite. If he burps, and he will burp, there should be a residue of the meal's goodness coming through.

Most pop is acid-ready, but, combined with the flavor impact and carbonation levels, Pepsi is the one to open to put the fizzle in your za.

originally published here.

Stevie's Bag of Tea

Matching Pop With Sausage Pizza: Pepsi is the Best Choice