Frozen Detroit-Style Pizza, Take 2: I'll Top it Myself!

Over the past 2 years I've bought a few boxes of Motor City Pizza Co. frozen pizza from Costco. As frozen pizzas go, they're pretty good. As pizza goes, though, they're enh. When I wrote about trying their meat combo pizza a few weeks ago one friend, stinaleigh, suggested I try their cheesy bread. So I did.



My plan wasn't simply to try the cheesy bread; I intended to make it into a more Detroit-style pizza than their other varieties.

One hallmark of Detroit style is that there's no sauce under the cheese. Sauce is added on after baking, in "racing stripes" across the top. This characteristic might be debatable, but to me it's one of the few things that make Detroit style pizza a unique style— otherwise it's "Oh, look, Pizza Hut pan pizza!"— so I'm going with it.



With this trial I went with a simple topping choice: pepperoni. It's my favorite topping anyway. And rather than put sauce on top I heated it in a dish and used it as a dip. The reason for that was practical: don't make a mess on the serving plate.

How did it turn out? For frozen store-bought pizza it was amazing. For all pizza it was... actually pretty decent!

Three things helped:

1) Better sauce. As I noted before, one of the weaknesses of this brand is their marinara sauce is awful. It's too acidic. Just using a decent bottled sauce from the supermarket (my fave is Prego) was an enormous improvement.

2) Better toppings. I don't think I mentioned it before, but the brand's toppings are crud, too. The pepperoni and other meats just taste... cheap. Like high school cafeteria cheap. 😨🤢 Just using Hormel pepperoni bought at the grocery store was a marked improvement.

3) Don't over-bake. My usual inclination is to bake a pizza until it's more golden colored than in the picture above. Especially with frozen pizza the edges are generally brown by the time the frozen cheese in the middle is fully melted together. With this brand's thick crust, though, I found the crust was getting too dried out. So I tried reducing the baking time a few minutes. This was frankly easier with no toppings on at the start. That heavy layer of meats on the combo pie may look delicious it but it  causes the cheese underneath to melt slower. I added my not-frozen pepperoni only halfway through the bake. Everything came out perfect. The crust actually had a light, airy texture!

I'll definitely do this again. In fact, I think this is now my go-to frozen pizza.

The Methusela Tree

We made our hike last Sunday a twofer. Not only did we hike through Corte de Madera Open Space to the Tafoni Monolith (aka SKULL ROCK); after that we visited the Methusela Tree. It was right next to where we parked, so in that sense us parking at the "wrong" parking lot to hike to Sku— I mean,Tafoni— wasn't really wrong.



Methusela is a reference to the biblical character Methuselah, in the Book of Genesis, who lived 969 years. (The name is spelled various ways in English because it's translated from a language with a different alphabet. In Hebrew it's מְתוּשֶׁלַח.) This particular tree has lived almost twice as long as that patriarch, an estimated 1,860 years.

This tree is a California Redwood. While 1,860 years is very old for this type of tree— really for any living thing— it's not like the Bristlecone Pine. A grove of Bristlecone Pine on Wheeler Peak in the Great Basin desert are 3,000+ years old. A grove in the White Mountains of California has Bristlecone Pine trees over 5,000 years old. Even other redwoods, especially the Sequoia Redwood (different species from California, aka Coastal, Redwood) can live to 3,500 years old.

While Methusela here isn't the oldest tree, she's the oldest in the area. Most other redwoods around here are thought to be only several hundred years old. And because this tree is a redwood it's big. She topped out at 225' tall before a storm in 1954— a few month ago, in her life span— damaged her top, and it broke off. The base, where you see us standing in the pic, is 14' diameter.