Pizza Farms are a Midwest thing, but I’ve been able to find places from coast to coast that are doing something similar. Last night we went West to Hideaway Bakery and the Mazzi family farm in Eugene, Oregon. If I had a few extra weekend days, I would have checked out Agrarian Ales in Eugene. It sounds like it has all the elements of a pizza farm, although it identifies even more as a beer farm that also grows food.
I showed up to Hideaway Bakery on the early side of dinner. My friends from Eugene had visited the bakery during the day and Mazzi’s Italian restaurant for dinner, but they noted immediately that the parking lot was way more crowded than usual and the back area outside was transformed with tables, chairs, musicians, and an outdoor bar, pizza making station, and wood-fired oven.
We found a table that was partially shaded and put in our order. The menu had plenty of good looking options and we kept seeing amazing salads being brought out, so we started with one beet and one blackberry salad, tried a wide variety of pizzas for dinner, and when everyone else was stuffed, my friend’s 7 year old daughter and I hit up the bakery case for dessert.
The pizzas included a plain cheese, mushroom and bleu cheese, chicken and padron pepper, and fig and prosciutto. The salads came out first and the pizza shortly after. I noticed they had a pretty big pizza oven and were able to have quite a few pies in at a time. The pizza toppings come from the farm which is about a mile away and from other local farms and cheese from local creameries. All the combinations that we ordered tasted great and we showed that we are pizza eating champions by finishing just about every bit of food we ordered.
Overall, the experience was very enjoyable, even if we weren’t eating our pizzas on the farm. The bluegrass band kept the atmosphere upbeat and pleasant and the delicious food was very satisfying after a long, hot day. As often happens for me at a pizza farm, some of the cheese stole the show, this time including the chevre on the salads and the bleu and gooey mozzarella on the pizza. To top off our Pacific NW version of a Pizza Farm trip, we filled up our gas tanks at SeQuential Biofuels on the way home.
Pizza eating champions!!! Great post, Gina!