Pauly's Pizza, Batavia

I recently had occasion to stop in Batavia, and took the opportunity to check out Pauly's Pizza.
When I stopped in around noon, there were plenty of slices available, but pepperoni was about the only choice. There may have been a cheese pie in there somewhere but pepperoni seemed like the way to go. Always best to go with a high-turnover choice when you're getting slices.
My two slices had a thin-to-medium crust, with a considerably thicker edge. The underside was dry, not oily, nicely browned, and lightly dusted with corn meal. The slices were soft enough to be folded, with a little exterior crunch, and a bit of interior breadiness as well. Which means it was a pretty good crust.
These slices had a "heavy" feel to them - in other words, they felt heavier than I expected them to, from their appearance. The crust wasn't particularly dense, so I think that was mostly due to the generous layer of cheese, and to some extent the sauce as well. The pepperoni wasn't applied in abundance, but these were cheesy, saucy slices.
The cheese - which Pauly's stressing is "100% high quality REAL cheese," seemed to be all mozzarella. It was uniformly applied and melted to just short of browning. A few flecks of dried herbs were visible, and tasteable (which is a word) in the sauce.
Pauly's (which has one of the busiest - and I'm not talking about web traffic - websites I've seen) offers 17 pizza toppings, and six specialty pizzas, plus a substantial menu of wings, subs, ribs, pasta, and more. Beer and wine are available.
This was good, well-made pizza. Decent crust, generous but not overloaded toppings, and good flavor. I'm not going to say it was head and shoulders above other pizzerias around here, so I'm not giving it an A, but it was above average, and without any real flaws to speak of, so I'll give it a B+.
Pauly's Pizza, 314 Ellicott Street, Batavia
Phone:  (585) 343-3100
Also 9980 Main St., Clarence. (716) 759-7700

Open from 11:00 a.m. daily

Book Review: The 150 Best Slow Cooker Recipes

If you'd like to do more home cooking but are pressed for time, you have a couple of options. One is to cook dishes that don't take long to make. While that doesn't necessarily mean limiting yourself to ramen noodles and mac 'n' cheese, it does limit your options, especially if you want to cook from scratch.
The other option is to use a slow cooker, or what most of us refer to as a crockpot. With one of these countertop appliances, you can throw something together in the morning and have a hot entree waiting for you when you arrive home in the late afternoon.
Trouble is, even if you have a slow cooker ("Crock-Pot" is a registered trademark of the Rival Company"), and even if you're handy in the kitchen, you may not have a lot of ideas about what to do with it, aside from a few obvious dishes like stew and chili.
To expand your slow-cooker repertoire, The 150 Best Slow Cooker Recipes can help. Now in its second edition, this cookbook by food writer Judith Finlayson combines a useful general guide to using your slow cooker and a broad compendium of recipes covering everything from appetizers and fondues to soups, meat entrees, grain-based sides, and desserts.
According to the back-cover blurb, the second edition includes 100 recipes from the first edition, which was published ten years ago, plus 75 new recipes, "including 25 bonus recipes!" I'm not sure why it's not just called The 175 Best Slow Cooker Recipes, or what makes those 25 recipes "bonus," but there's enough here to allow you to dine on slow-cooker meals for months without getting bored.
The recipes run from basic, tried-and-true standards like chicken and dumplings and pot roast to ethnic dishes like lamb korma with spinach and pork vindaloo. The recipes are clearly presented and accompanied by practical tips about matters like cooking techniques and ingredient substitutions. For the most part, ingredient lists and instructions are relatively brief, and all the recipes in the book can be put together in a reasonably short time. An eight-page introduction also provides a succinct overview of slow cooker basics.
The book is logically arranged, with chapters progressing from appetizers to entrees, sides and desserts. The index is thorough and easy to use, and the book is nicely illustrated, with full-page color photographs of about a third of the finished dishes.
When I've got the time, I enjoy preparing a full meal, step by step. And thankfully I've got a wife who prepares home-cooked meals for our family most days, when I'm at work. But there are times when we're both going to be tied up all day, and when that happens, a slow cooker is a great option. And now we don't have to get bored with the same old dishes. I like beef stew and chili as much as the next guy, but I'm looking forward to working my way through The 150 Best Slow Cooker Recipes.
The 150 Best Slow Cooker Recipes, by Judith Finlayson. (2nd ed. 2011) Robert Rose, Inc. 288 pages.

Tony D's Tomato Pie

During my recent mini-tour of Rochester pizzerias with fellow pizza blogger "Lapp" from WorstPizza.com, one of our stops was Tony D's in Corn Hill.
I've done a couple of posts now about Tony D's, the most recent being this past April. But I knew there were more pizzas on the menu that I wanted to try, so when Lapp mentioned that somebody had recommended Tony D's to him, I happily seconded the idea.
As things turned out, I made no further progress on the menu, though. As I was perusing said menu while sitting at the bar overlooking the open kitchen, a freshly made pie was briefly placed on a tray next to me, before being whisked off to a customer's table.
Sometimes when you're eating out, you see a dish, and you think, "That's what I'm getting." (Which is far preferable to seeing it after you've already gotten your food, and you think, "That's what I should have ordered.") This was one of those times. This pie looked simple but delicious.
I was able to corral a nearby server and found out that the pizza in question was that night's special, a tomato pie with sun-dried tomatoes, Romano and basil. It had sounded promising when our own server told us about it, but seeing one up close clinched it.
Lapp chose a 10-inch pie for his dinner (check out his review of his pie here), but I went with the large, which is 14 inches in diameter. But I didn't have to fly home the next day, so I knew I could take any leftovers home without much difficulty.
My pie tasted as good as I expected. It wasn't all that much different from Tony D's Margherita pizza, perhaps a bit more tomatoey, with a sharper cheese flavor, but overall there was a good balance among the tomatoes, cheese, basil and crust.
As for that crust - visually, it bore all the hallmarks of a great, crisp crust from a super-hot oven, with charring along the edge and underneath. In fact, in some spots on the bottom, the outer surface of the crust was charred right through (see bottom photo). And it did have a certain smokiness to it.
So it was a surprise to find that the crust was really quite soft. It wasn't mushy or spongy or anything like that, it was just not at all crisp.
Now before I go criticizing Tony D's about things I don't really understand, let me say that I have read that pizzas in Naples typically have a soft, pliable crust. It mostly has to do with the flour they use, which is relatively low in protein. Clearly heat wasn't the issue here, so it seems to me that it must indeed be the dough that resulted in this soft, pliable crust.
Technical matters aside, then, this crust may not be far off from "authentic" Neapolitan pizza. But for me there was still a bit of a disconnect between the appearance of the crust and its texture.
I must admit, though, that I prefer a crisp crust. And I guess I also expect to get a crisp crust from a place with a coal-fired oven (actually they were using both coal and wood on my visit, but no matter), which conjures up images of old-time pizzerias in New York City, with crusts that crackle a bit when you bite into them.
So that's where rating a pizza gets tough. I don't want to downgrade this pizza purely because of my subjective preferences, but it's hard to completely put those preferences aside.
I've given Tony D's an A-minus before, and I think I'll stick with that. As I've said in the past, the grades are no more than a rough guideline, and readers should focus on my descriptions to decide if they think they'd like the pizza at a given establishment. If I thought that Tony D's had been striving for something else here, but fell short of the mark, I'd lower the grade, but as far as I can tell, they simply use a dough that bakes up rather soft. I've downgraded places for soft crusts before, but generally only if the crust was greasy, spongy, or had some other defects. So with the caveat that Tony D's serves up a soft-crusted, but well-charred pizza, I'll again give it an A-minus rating.
I do have one thing to add, though.This 14-inch pie cost $18, while Lapp's 10-inch pie, with custom-ordered toppings, was less than half that amount, at $8. If you're going by surface area, his pie was a little over half the size of mine, and unless sun-dried tomatoes are more expensive than I thought, mine seemed pretty pricey. Cost doesn't figure into my grades, but I think it's worth making readers aware that if cost is an issue, ordering your toppings a la carte may save you a dollar or two.
Tony D's, 288 Exchange Blvd. 14608
Tel. 340-6200
Hours:  Sun.  4 - 10 p.m., Mon. - Thu. 11 a.m. - 10 p.m., Fri. 11 a.m. - 11 p.m., Sat. 4 - 11 p.m.