queso rah! hurrah!

By Todd Stadler · Sunday, April 6, 2003 3:02am

I've been trying to wrap my head around Pizza Hut's Stuffed Crust Gold pizza for some time now.

Not literally, of course. I wouldn't touch that stuff unless every other pizza place in Portland shut down.

But it's this issue of the cheese arms race that confuses me.

When I was a boy, most people ordered regular pizzas, and the occasional "crazy cheese guy" would order extra cheese on his pie.

More recently, Pizza Hut decided to listen to the plea of Americans that they simply weren't getting enough cheese on each pizza.

With the traditional pizza payload area already saturated with cheese (at least on an extra cheese pizza), the engineers at Yum! Brands (formerly known as Tricon Global Restaurants; whyever did they change their name?) came up with the ingenius idea to stuff more cheese into the crust, which had previously only held largely unsaturated bread products.

It was a bold move, and it quieted the threats of civil unrest from cheese-crazy citizens who needed a higher cheese-per-bite quotient.

Until recently, that is, when the collective stomach of America rumbled that there simply wasn't enough cheese lying around in the collective bowels of America.

Once again, Pizza Hut scientists responded with even more cheese, but their offering was fairly nominal ? a mere sprinkling of additional cheese on top of the cheese-filled crust.

Clearly, the bold vision that enabled the stuffed crust pizza is gone. And yet the demand for more cheese on our pizzas has never been higher.

Forthwith, some suggestions from me and my friends on how to deal with this dilemma.

• Toppings made of cheese. At the very least, completely cheese-free (and fat-free ? what's up with that?) toppings like jalape?os could be replaced with their closest cheesy equivalent, such as jalape?o poppers. Similarly, meats like italian sausage and pepperoni could be replaced with some fromage-filled frankfurter like a cheese dog.

  But these are baby steps, at best. Any real cheese whiz knows that such solutions aren't maximizing the cheese-per-unit-volume potential! Why not just toss on a nice assortment of cheese cubes? Or, for variety, cheese slices!

• While it's hard to top toppings when it comes to variety and a near-limitless ability to add more cheese, there are many other components of the pizza that have been ignored in the quest for ultimate cheese density. Accordingly, I recommend that we not overlook the simple possibility offered by exchanging the traditional tomato-based pizza sauce for a liquidy, pasteurized process cheese sauce as manufactured by Kraft, et al. Frankly, I doubt many cheese lovers will miss what little flavor was contributed by a thin layer of tomato sauce and spices.

• Finally, but most technically difficult, we must find a way to make the crust itself out of cheese. Science may not be capable of such a feat right now, but American consumers will ultimately demand it, and if we do not begin researching this important question now, then the horrible nightmare I keep having of the Cheese Riots of 2015 may come true.

  Would we first start out with a cheese/grain crust mixture? Would it be stable? Could we then move on to a 100% cheese crust-like substance, perhaps something like a crust-pressboard made out of Kraft parmesan cheese?

These would be by no means trivial accomplishments, but they are clearly necessary to allow for the human race to continue its evolution into a race of completely cheese-based lifeforms.