please stop slandering my pizza

I’m not sure how it took me this long to get to this week’s newsletter topic: St. Louis-style pizza. It’s my hottest food take, which I had no idea was even a take for the first 18 years of my life. But ever since I packed up and left St. Louis in my dad’s Honda Accord in 2006, I’ve been prattling some version of it to anyone who says a single nice thing about deep dish or a single mean thing about my hometown. Once, my former employer, Sports Illustrated, even let me write about it for a short-lived venture we called “SI Eats.”

I got a lot of emails in response. Some of them weren’t particularly kind. Here’s hoping I’m ranting to a more open-minded audience this time around.

In the videos, it’s a duck and a German shepherd, or a rabbit and a cat — animals that exist at opposite ends of the food chain but, for confusing biological reasons, have imprinted on one another. That duck is my mother, the guard dog thinks, because he’s never been taught to think anything else. I belong to that bunny’s cult, the tabby has decided, because she’s never been presented with a better belief system.

Those relationships are the closest parallel I can come up with to how I feel about St. Louis-style pizza. It is pizza, the best kind of pizza, and I know this to be true only because at a very young age, I was never given any alternative. I imprinted.

And here’s the thing: That duck might be a great dog mom, and that cat’s cult could very well offer a fulfilling lifestyle, and Imo’s is good — if you adjust your expectations for mothers, for gurus, for pizza.

I wish I had a newer picture of Imo's, from a camera better than my phone's in 2017.

St. Louis-style pizza, and Imo’s more specifically, has been maligned far and wide. It’s been called a giant nacho, a burned saltine, a tiny square of heresy. It might even be all of those things. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t delicious.

To enjoy St. Louis-style pizza, forget about crust. You’re going to get cheese and toppings right up to the burned, crispy edges. Do some creative math, too: The ratio of said cheese and toppings to any kind of bread-like base layer is something like 2:1. That’s because yeast has no place in St. Louis-style pies; the whole production is piled atop something that bears more resemblance to matzoh than it does dough. Done right, it’s cracker-thin, crispy and has no problem whatsoever holding up the weight of pepperoni, mushrooms, sausage, peppers and provel.

Oh — provel. Did I bury the lede? That’s our cheese. It’s a combination of cheddar, Swiss and provolone that resembles exactly none of those things and tastes a bit like Gouda. It’s been processed beyond recognition, by means I have no interest in researching or ever knowing, and as a result, it has a super low melting point. That means on pizza, it ends up with a creamy, gooey texture; it’s almost sauce-like and incapable of anything resembling a cheese pull.

It’ll also shellac itself to the roof of your mouth, so bite carefully.

For all its idiosyncrasies — did I mention you can buy it, shaped like a small, colorless human brain, in a little plastic tub at most St. Louis grocery stores? — provel actually tastes pretty good. It’s creamy and smoky and a great contrast to salty-sweet tomato sauce. It’s just as good after a night in the fridge as it is fresh out of the oven, and so is the burnt-saltine crust. It’s — somehow, I swear, see for yourself — still crispy. Still delicious.

I landed on this newsletter topic over the weekend, after a pizza-fueled Saturday and Sunday that left me happy but also uncomfortably full. And as I foundered, it occurred to me: The pizza of my youth — the right kind of pizza — doesn’t leave me in agony on the couch.

I guess that’s the risk of other pizza. And sometimes it’s a risk worth taking.

Saturday night, my husband and I tried Crooked Run Fermentation, a new brewery not too far from our house in D.C. that serves pies from Pizza Serrata. The beer — I had a nutty, coffee-tinged rye IPA — was great. The pizza was fascinating.

We got the Delbar, which looked like a small, slightly flattened but once puffy round of bread, loaded down with cheese, spicy tomato sauce, pickled peppers and fried calamari. I have never consumed puffier pizza — but it wasn’t as heavy as I imagined it would be. The calamari was crispy perfection, and the sauce was so spicy it gave me heartburn, which I don’t necessarily consider a bad thing. Was it my favorite pizza? No. Would I try something else on the menu, like the tomato pie or the one topped with sausage and broccoli rabe? Absolutely.

Then, the next night, we tried another newish neighborhood spot, Della Barba Pizza, which is close enough to our house to be dangerous. It’s a tiny spot, with maybe four eat-in two-seater tables, and most of the business is takeout. On our walk over, we passed no fewer than three other couples walking away with pizza boxes in the span of six blocks, and now I know why.

Della Barba offers three styles of crust: New York thin, nonna and Detroit. We tried the nonna, which Della Barba describes as a “thicker, saucier and cheesier” pie than the New York style; it was square, cut into triangles and crispy at the edges like the perfect pan pizza. I want more. I want it every day. I ate the final piece for lunch on Tuesday and felt deeply sad.