Every year, the Portland Mercury hosts ‘Pizza Week’; a week where local businesses give back to the community by selling four dollar slices of exclusive and fun pizzas. This year, there was a bit of a surprise on the menu; Benson Polytechnic High School’s cooking club will be selling their very own Pizza Week pizza during Tech Show!
I got to talk to Mr. Schierer, the cooking club advisor, about Pizza Week. Schierer told me that he had first had the idea to get Benson involved while enjoying another of the Mercury’s food weeks.
“I was sitting there eating a hotdog [during ‘Weiner Week’] in one of the restaurants and I was just like ‘Man, I wonder if they have one of those weeks during Tech Show?’ So I sent them an email, I just looked up their website and sent them an email,” and the response was nearly instantaneous, Schierer received an email back in minutes, and they got to work.
A few days later, he was on a call with someone from the Mercury to work out all the details; “I kind of asked him about stuff, like is two nights enough, or was that not enough to be listed? He was like ‘No, I think it’s perfect as long as we put all that information on the website.’ And so, after that, it was a whirlwind trying to get the pizza ready. We thought of it mid-March and the pizza recipe was due at the end of March. So we had two weeks to come up with a funky pizza.”
And funky it is. The ‘Blueberry Threat’, created by Benson Senior Caitlin Bice, is a pizza topped with marinara sauce, mozzarella, cheddar, onions, orange bell pepper, pepperoni and chorizo, sprinkled with red pepper flakes and parmesan and drizzled with their house made ‘Blueberry Threat’ hot honey. Don’t be intimidated though, Bice assured me that, “once you mix [the hot honey] with the blueberry it makes it a lot sweeter, so there’s a really good balance of the sweetness of the blueberry hot honey on top of the spicy ingredients.” Bice said she had wanted to use Benson’s school colors (blue and orange) in the pizza but was, “really stuck on the blue.” She had kept coming back to the idea of blueberry, but dismissed it — She was told, “Why would you put blueberries on pizza? That sounds so gross,” — but she couldn’t kick the idea, eventually deciding, “It’s Pizza Week! We’re supposed to be experimental,” and decided on the blueberry honey drizzle. “I was just trying to find a tasteful way to incorporate it,”
Schierer also shared how he is hoping that Benson’s participation in Pizza Week will become a new Tech Show tradition; “What I hope to do next year is make a little school-wide competition,” where students, both in and out of cooking club, can submit their ideas and recipes for unique Pizza Week pizzas. This year, the ‘Blueberry Threat’ pizza will be sold at the Benson Tech Show, April 17th and 18th from 6-9pm. All proceeds from the pizzas will be split between the cooking club and Construction, as Construction has historically sold pizzas at Tech Show.
