Calizza

Alright, when you look at this, you might be thinking to yourself, he's blogging about tomato sauce? In all truth, yes I am, but there is a reason, and this is not just any sauce either. I used to work at a Pizza Hut for a couple of years, and it was one of the jobs I really enjoyed. I worked with a great staff, yes even you Monica, and the management were good to work with too. It helps that I eventually became a manager there, and suggested all of my friends who were hired and worked with me. I think I had five of my friends working there with me, which was awesome. However, this post isn't about Pizza Hut, at least not directly.

During the time I worked there, there were four different sauces. I guess normally you don't think about that, but it's true. There was the regular sauce, white sauce, zesty sauce and calizza sauce. Most of what people think about as sauce is just the regular sauce. We used white sauce for an alfredo like pizza that didn't last all that long. That sauce was good, but I think it was so expensive it was eating into the profit margin. Then there is zesty sauce. The Hut uses this on their stuffed crust pizzas; I guess it helps set them apart. But of all the sauces that Pizza Hut used while I worked there, the king was Calizza.

Now the word Calizza is nowhere on the menu. It's only mentioned as Calizza in two places. One is the plackard on the sauce pump in the kitchen, and the other is on the label that comes on the box it is shipped in. If you know Calizza, that means you probably worked at the Hut. The rest of the world knows Calizza sauce as breadstick sauce. You might have assumed that the breadstick sauce was just pizza sauce, but it's not.

When I worked there, one of the perks was a limited amount of free food. During your shift, you could make yourself either a personal pizza, an order of breadsticks, or a dozen wings. I was always more of a wing man, no pun intended, and I'd make wings, or for the occasional bit of variety, I'd cook up a pizza. It was months before I actually got myself an order of breadsticks, though that was what most of the people who worked there ate. When I tried it, I found out why everyone in the joint seemed to be addicted to the breadsticks. It's isn't for the dry breadsticks, it's for the sauce. It's for that wonderful pipping hot spiced sauce.

Now I tried what every person who has ever worked at the Hut for a while has probably also tried. I pumped the hot sauce into a personal pizza and cooked it up. It didn't cook right. Something about the sauce being so hot already screwed up the crust. I learned what to do though. You have to pump the sauce into a cup and let it completely cool, then you can use it to make a really good pizza. It has more water in it than the normal sauce, so you can't use as much of it either, but what a difference it makes.

So are you going to be able to try this yourself? Probably not. The best you can do is probably order some breadsticks and imagine what it would be like.