Bella Italia began advertising a pizza challenge a few weeks ago which seemed crazy, but doable. The challenge required a team of two to eat a 30″ meat lovers pizza in under 60 minutes. If we could take it out, 200 big ones would be ours. I’m sure that $200 would go towards future medical bills for some sort of cardiac disease, but it seemed like a good idea for some reason.
The problem with this was I remembered the contest during work the same day and had no time to prepare. I simply tried to drink as much water as possible and didn’t eat for the entire day. For the team, I recruited Mackenzie, a fellow eating machine, to help me out.
They got out the giant pizza shovel and stared started making the pizza. It didn’t really look all that bad. We were relieved to see that the pizza crust wasn’t as thick as we thought it would be. The thing I was worried about were the rubix cube size chunks of ham being added. Morale was high, but concern definitely existed.
They brought out the biggest pizza box I have ever seen in my life and decided to put a large pizza box inside just to show us what we were getting ourselves into. If you can’t tell from the visual, the 30″ pizza is the equivalent of four larges. Oh yeah, and don’t forget the 2 pounds of meat on top. This wasn’t looking good.
We were actually pretty damn confident when the pizza finally came out. This was definitely something we thought we could pull off. We were in for one hell of a surprise. I thought the stack method would be the best way to go. This was supposed to consist of me cutting my half into different sections and stacking the pieces on top of each other and eating them together. The problem was that the crust was so thin the pieces kept breaking and falling apart. We then began rolling the pieces and eating them that way but ended up reverting to just grabbing up piles of cheese and meat with our hands and eating as quickly as possible.
We started off good, taking out about half the pizza in about 8 minutes. We hit the wall after that though. The combination of all the grease, meat, and huge pieces of crust at the ends of the slices makes this a pretty ridiculous challenge. I was sweating like a fat man, and felt drunk on pizza.
After about the 25 minutes, we completely hit the wall. Our heads were telling us to keep going but our stomachs were threatening to eject. We decided to give up with a little more than 3/4 of the pizza digested.
I really think with a little more prep this challenge could be completed. I think I need to detox for a month or two before I try and attempt this again. Oh, and if you were wondering If I as exaggerating about the ham, look in the bottom left corner of the picture above. Those chunks are ridiculous.
Bella Italia Pizza & Pasta
895 W Eisenhower Pkwy
Ann Arbor, MI 48103
(734) 222-9994
http://www.bellaitaliapizzaandpasta.com/