Testing the quality of shop-bought pizzas – vocabulary and notes

Michelin-starred – adj – of someone who has won several Michelin stars for his / her restaurant food.
Blind tastings are carried out to ensure tasters’ judgement of products are impartial, as they cannot judge anything from the label or packaging. Sometimes tasters are even blindfolded – so they have a blindfold (a piece of cloth) put over their eyes so they cannot deduce anything about what they are tasting and so rely entirely on their sense of taste to deliver their judgments.
When we bake pastry blind we bake the pastry without the filling in it.
crisp – adj – (comparative crisper, superlative crispest) – brittle, perhaps prone to breaking if touched lightly; having some degree of firmness and freshness
If something is crispy – (comparative crispier, superlative crispiest) it is used of food, meaning fresh – a crisp lettuce – or cooked or baked to make it firm – eg some crispy pies – (the pastry would be crispy)
garlicky – tasting or smelling of garlic
stone-baked – adj – pizzas baked on a stone base cook evenly
soggy – adj – unpleasantly wet and soft (of things which can absorb water, especially food) – eg My shoes are soggy from the rain; My cereal has gone all soggy.

Points of language:
"The pizza could be = would be better if it was – eg It (the sausage taste) could be a bit stronger / it could be spicier – would be better if it was stronger/ spicier.
The pizza base does it = the pizza base is a decisive factor. Eg That does it – I’m leaving! That is the final thing / comment / realisation etc that has made me decide to leave.
Eg It could do with being a bit bigger – it would be better if it was bigger / it would benefit from being bigger. Eg We could do with a walk = we would benefit from having a walk, it would do us good to go for a walk.
Just looking at the crust I thought it would be ….. = Angela juxtaposes what the pizza looked like with what it tasted like. She found when she tasted it it tasted better than she expected.
To rate sth / sb is to judge the value or character of someone or something – eg How do they rate him as a manager? Their trips are rated very highly by the Tourist Board. She doesn’t rate her new car = She has a poor opinion of her new car.
Because the verbs rate and slate rhyme, columnists sometimes use to rate as the opposite of to slate, which is informal to criticise – eg Which did she rate highest, which did she slate most? Or Which did she rate? Which did she slate?
GDP
The chef makes the joke at the end (addressed to the prime Minister, Gordon Brown) that she is ‘saving on the GP’ – she presumably means GDP, how much she is spending. We rarely pay for a doctor – a GP – in Britain, and you would not expect to have to pay for a doctor after eating pizza. We hope!

Back to the Home Page

Back for some grammar exercises