Pizza Pilgrimage - Day Four

Day Four - Glass Nickel Pizza Co.

Our journey on Day 4 was not over until we arrived in Madison, WI. I had been trying to scout the area via the internet to see what our possibilities might be for pizza that evening. We were due to meet up with some friends of ours the next morning. After letting them know we arrived and our intention was to go out and eat pizza, they invited us over to their house and ordered pizza to be delivered. So our third (or fourth) stop for pizza would not be at a restaurant. No matter.Glass Nickel Pizza Co. sounds like a place that you would find in a college town, but if you go to their website and read their history, it will make more sense: http://www.glassnickelpizza.com/

Glass Nickel had been one of the choices I was contemplating on our pizza road-trip. Reading the various comments about it on the web, it appeared to fall into one of those “you either really like it or really don’t” categories. It is a small chain, found only in Wisconsin, so it met our criteria for pizza sampling. I had originally thought about going out to dinner at Picaso’s Pizza in nearby Verona, WI, but Glass Nickel was offered and I had no strong feelings on the matter.

The pizzas that were ordered were cheese, chicken, and a Fetalicious®, so no Italian sausage or mushroom this time around. Glass Nickel appears to be one of those places that experiment’s with toppings in the California tradition. If you go to their menu on their website, you’ll see good examples of their finished products (I forgot to take the camera so I don’t have any personal pics of the pizza): http://www.glassnickelpizza.com/Menu/menu.html

This was definitely a different animal than our 2 previous pizza samplings. The crust was thicker and chewy, so I can only surmise they use bread or high gluten flour. In that sense, the crust was somewhat reminiscent of a foldable New York pie, but the crust was thicker, even a little bit more than a Pizza Hut Hand-tossed pie, with a nice thick cornicione. I also suspect they use some wheat flour in their pizza dough, although my friend and their website could not confirm it. The taste was very good. The closest we have in our neighborhood to what this pizza crust reminded me of would be Wheat State Pizza: http://wheatstatepizza.com/

The cheese pizza had their typical red sauce. Like our previous samplings, it was still on the sweet side but had more of an herby flavor to it. The sauce was not as abundant on these pizzas and was not as big a player in the flavor factor.The cheese was plentiful on all of the pizzas. The chicken pizza was more bland and the chicken pieces were a little on the dry side, but overall it was still good. The Fetalicious was interesting. As you can tell by the name, they used feta cheese along with tomatoes, onions, spinach, and mushrooms. I’m usually not a big fan of feta cheese on pizza, but it seemed to work on this one. Perhaps it was the particular blend of cheese they used.

Overall, I give Glass Nickel Pizza Co. 4 out of 5 pizzas. I’m glad we were able to sample it. I would order it again but would probably skip the foo-foo toppings and go straight to my standard 2 toppings to see how it really measured up.

Our next stop: the Milwaukee area.