Gifts for the Pizza Lover, 2012 Edition

It's that time of the year again, so here are some suggestions for the pizza lover in your life, or to put on your own wish list.
Full disclosure: I think I get some small compensation if you click on the links or buy a product through them. I'm not sure, frankly, exactly how it works. But these are my honest suggestions, and if you want to shop around, by all means do so.
(1) a pizza stone -anybody who bakes pizza at home should have some sort of pizza stone. You'll get a much better crust with a stone than with a pan. (There are exceptions, but for basic pizza, a stone is the way to go.)
I mostly use cheap quarry tiles that I get from a local tile store, but a box of what look like thin, square red bricks doesn't make the greatest looking gift. I do also use a genuine pizza stone, which was given to me as a gift, and it works very well. I prefer rectangular stones over round ones, because I think they give you a little more room for error when you're sliding the pizza onto the stone, which you will do with a
(2) pizza peel, which makes another great gift. I have two, a wooden peel for sliding the pizza into the oven and an aluminum peel for getting it out. Why both? The raw dough seems to slide better on a wooden peel, while the thin edge of a metal peel is better for getting underneath the finished product.
(3) for a stocking stuffer, a bench scraper or a bowl scraper. Whether you're baking pizza or bread, these are very handy implements. Even if you only do a little kneading or shaping on a board, a bench scraper is great for moving around mounds of flour and stuck dough, and for cleaning off your board. A flexible bowl scraper is much better than a spatula at scraping down the sides of a mixing bowl. 
(4) a pizza cutter. These are useful not just for homemade pizzas, but even for takeout, which is sometimes not cut cleanly through. A wheel cutter works well, and is versatile. I used mine the other day to cut pieces of dough for a gingerbread house. But for simplicity and a nice straight edge, it's hard to beat a rocking cutter.
(5) A chef's hat (or "toque") and apron. These are great for getting in the spirit of things when you're making pizza, especially with guests. And they serve useful purposes. If you make pizza without an apron, you will end up with flour on your clothes, guaranteed. And the hat? Well, finding a hair in your pizza is a real turnoff for most people. A baseball cap will do, but I love my chef's hat.
(6) an insulated pizza bag. Useful for takeout, especially if the pizzeria is some distance from your home. Every pizza lover should keep one in the trunk, right next to the jack and the jumper cables.
(7) a pizza cookbook. There are countless free recipes online, but I still like a genuine, authoritative book to have as a reference. There's a plethora of good books on the subject, but I've yet to find one better than American Pie by Peter Reinhart. This dean of America's bread bakers provides sound advice about techniques, as well as recipes for everything from traditional Neapolitan pizza to New York style to generic American pizza, and thick-crust Sicilian and Chicago pizzas as well.
(8) and of course, a gift certificate from your or your giftee's favorite pizzeria. Many local pizzerias now offer gift cards or certificates. You can't go wrong with that.

Fastrac

I generally don’t even consider buying pizza at a gas station. For one thing, unless they’ve got a full-blown pizzeria setup, they’re just baking pizzas on premade crusts, with no craftsmanship involved. Plus almost every gas station is part of a chain, and I am not very interested in chain pizza, period.
But sometimes, I go into a station or a convenience store, and see a pizza sitting there in the warmer and I can’t help thinking, it doesn’t look half bad. And maybe I’m hungry. And it’s cheap. So ...
So I broke down the other day and got two slices from Fastrac, a regional chain of gas stations that has some of the cheaper gasoline prices around, at least if you have one of their cards. They all serve pizza, under the name “Slices,” and as gas station pizza goes, it’s not the worst-looking pizza around. So my curiosity got the best of me, and I picked up a pepperoni slice and a Buffalo chicken slice.
The latter was very thin, with a crunchy, almost crackerlike crust that had been docked, i.e., punched with tiny holes to keep it from bubbling up in the oven. The edge lacked any lip or cornicione to speak of, but where the underside was crisp, the edge was hard and brittle, with a good deal of “bite.”
The Buffalo slice was topped with small chunks of plain, unbreaded chicken, an even layer of slightly browned mozzarella, and blue cheese sauce, with a swirl of basic hot sauce for that Buffalo-wing flavor. The overall flavor wasn’t bad, particularly if you like your wings dipped in blue cheese. This was missing the “fried” flavor of pizza made with breaded chicken, but it was also missing the grease that often accompanies breaded chicken.
The pepperoni slice was qualitatively different, with a crust that was about the same thickness, but slightly oily to the touch underneath. It had a certain fried-like exterior crunch, but was soft and spongy inside. The bottom was also pockmarked by several bubbly air holes. And where the Buffalo chicken slice had virtually no cornicione, this slice was thick and puffy along the braided edge, which is consistent with what I’ve generally seen at Fastrac. The cornicione also had a certain sheen to it, similar to a loaf of bread that was brushed with an egg wash before baking, though I doubt very much that this was done here. Probably the shininess was simply due, again, so the presence of oil.
The pepperoni slice was topped with a basic tomato sauce, a modest layer of melted mozzarella, and some nondescript, wide and thin slices of pepperoni. A smattering of dried herbs was visible, and I thought I detected the distinctive aroma and taste of garlic powder.
These weren’t awful, but they were far from the best slices of pizza I’ve had. I should add, though, that these weren’t the best looking slices I’ve ever seen at Fastrac; these came from the East Main Street location downtown, near the Inner Loop, and were not as good-looking as the slices I’ve seen at the Fastrac at the corner of West Henrietta and Calkins Roads. I have yet to try the latter location’s pizza, so I’m not passing judgment here on Fastrac as a whole, though if the quality does vary much from one location to another, that’s an issue in itself.
As for these slices, I’d say they were below average for this area. Maybe not by a lot, but nonetheless below average, and so I have to give them a D.
Fastrac, 672 East Main Street, Rochester, with other locations throughout Western and Central New York.

And the Winner Is ...

Terry Lynch! Terry has won a $30 gift card from The Pizza Stop on Ridgeway Avenue in Greece. Congratulations Terry! I'll just need a mailing address so I can get it to you - shoot me an email at rochesternypizzaguy@gmail.com and I'll get it in the mail to you asap.

Thanks to all who participated, and to The Pizza Stop for donating this very fine prize. If you didn't win, don't despair - I'll be giving away another gift card for the original Pizza Stop location downtown soon. Check back here and on Facebook, or subscribe to my Twitter feed, for updates.