The Hot Chick

What could you love more than a really hot chick? I took a shot with one this past weekend - so hot that my eyes even watered a bit. This happened at Dave's Pizza in SoHo (that's South Homewood for those of you not from Birmingham - and yes, we realize SoHo is a stolen name)...

 Ok, so this hot chick is actually a pizza. At Dave's in SoHo, they serve "The Hot Chick" - a pizza that was listed as one of the Top 10 spicy foods/places in Birmingham. I promised I'd eat at some of these places and write about them, so buckle up for the first post! That list of spicy places can be found here at B-Metro's website (a great site for information on living in the Birmingham-metro area).

The Hot Chick

So onto the pizza... It was a little odd. I asked the waitress how how it was on a scale of 1-10. She said 11. I assumed that meant I could probably call it a 5. It's cooked on normal pizza dough. The meat is grilled chicken. And the pizza sauce - well, it isn't pizza sauce. It's hot sauce. The entire first layer of the pizza is hot sauce. There's also a good garlic butter sauce on it - not too much butter as is often the case.


Then you move into the cheese. It has their normal cheese blend on top - it's hard to tell when so many flavors are mixing together, but it tastes like a blend of mozzarella and provolone. I'm a sucker for some good provolone, so that helps my judgment of the pizza. Then on top of all of that, there are melted chunks of blue cheese. This is a great idea - not only because it's basically a hot-wing pizza and blue cheese dressing is a natural pairing. But blue cheeses are very pungent, with a sharp and salty flavor that pairs very well with other strongly flavored foods. This helps make the flavor a little more robust and keeps you from only tasting heat. I talked about this a little in a recent post, Some Like It Hot. You can see there is also a little greenery on top of the pie - those are the jalapeños that I had them add. In the second picture, you can see the peppers a little more closely. You can see the seeds on top of the pepper. This, of course, is where the capsaicin comes from, which I discussed in the previous post. Of course, these are actually one of the milder peppers in the grand scheme of things. But you don't have to add the peppers.

Peppers For Funsies

 
So on to the taste. The first bite kind of took my breath for a second, as well as made my eyes water a bit. I was really surprised actually. After a few more bites, I realized the sauce was an American-style sauce. These vary from Mexican-style sauces a good bit. Mexican-style is usually built more around flavor than heat. The American sauces are built around heat and usually contain a good bit of vinegar. Anyone who's had a good bag of salt and vinegar chips knows how this can open up your sinuses. So I continued on through it, and it wasn't too bad. I almost expected more. But, to be fair, this is at a pizzeria and people aren't really going there looking for super-spicy foods. And it was towards the bottom of the list. I look forward to sinking my teeth into something that makes me think twice about eating hot foods.





I'll be sure to try some of them soon and report back, and I'm also looking for some hot recipes to try out, so feel free to share! And if you're in the area, be sure to check out Dave's, and maybe even challenge yourself to The Hot Chick!


Tripp