This pizza looks delicious, but it really didn’t hit me in the heart like other places we have blogged about.
It took me about four pieces to figure out what this pie reminded me of, and it will make sense to none of you. When I went to Ashland University, there was this café in the student center called the Eagle’s Nest. You can almost think of it like a mall food court or the inside of a truck stop. Grab and go snacks, drinks, in-house pizza and sandwich station. You can at least connect with that!
Anyway, this pizza reminded me of the pizza my college friends and I would order from the Eagle’s Nest while playing Halo on Xbox 360 in my dorm room. Though nostalgic, the Eagle’s Nest wasn’t known for its pizza. It wasn’t bad, it wasn’t amazing, it was just pizza.
I would recommend that if you are going to Big Woods, try and stick with their specialty pizzas and don’t create your own. Their specialty pizzas looked and sounded amazing. Eric absolutely loved his, but I’ll let him tell that story.
If you still want to build your own pizza, I will say that the dough was by far my favorite part. It was pillowy yet doughy. It was like a hybrid of airy and chewy. The sauce really perplexed me for a few pieces though. It wasn’t acidic, and it wasn’t sweet either. I had to ask Eric to take a bite to help me identify what I was eating. We both concluded that this was not a typical pizza sauce, but marinara. It tasted like crushed fresh tomatoes. I felt kind of dumb because our waiter did ask if I wanted classic marina, but sometimes I feel like pizza places say their sauce is a marinara, but it’s a pizza sauce.
The cheese was gooey and stretchy, but I feel like it lacked a bit of flavor. I think if I had done it again, I may have added another cheese to the mozzarella for a little more oomph. I think the low point for me was the toppings. I got pepperoni (obvi) and their smoked bacon. I was expecting to at least taste the bacon and have a nice smokey flavor, but it was like a generic bacon crumble you’d get in like a make your salad at home kit.
The pepperoni could have been absent, and I wouldn’t have known the difference. My theory is that there was more cheese and crust compared to the toppings, so those two overwhelmed everything else on the pizza. It makes me really appreciate the balance of ingredients that I have found at some other pizza places.
It’s like I always say, you gotta get your basics down before you can excel at your specialties. However, it seems Big Woods was the outlier in this case.
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