Wheeling Into The Holidays With Culinary Institute Of America and Handley

We’re suck­ers for Ital­ian food. We’ve talked about our ad­ven­tures in pump­kin pas­ta. Flat­bread and piz­za are al­so staff fa­vorites. For some rea­son we’ve nev­er got­ten around to get­ting a piz­za cut­ter, so we were thrilled to get our hands on the Piz­za Wheel from Culi­nary In­sti­tute of Amer­i­ca. We tried it out with piz­za and, of course, a bot­tle of red wine (2009 Pinot Noir from Han­d­ley.

The piz­za wheel has a great heft to it- the stain­less steel blade is nice and sharp. We’re told that it’s pro­fes­sion­al qual­i­ty. It cer­tain­ly looks and feels like it, and comes with a life-time war­ran­ty. The on­ly down­side we found was a bit of ex­tra wig­gle in the blade, with no ap­par­ent way to tight­en the fit. It didn’t stop us from en­joy­ing the way it sliced right through the crust. It’s al­so great for brown­ies and cut­ting big choco­late chip cook­ies in­to wedges and… Well, at a point we start­ed look­ing for ex­cus­es to cut things. At $16 it’s a great gift for the food­ie (Or food­ies?) in your life.

Our Han­d­ley 2009 Pinot was metal­lic and un­der­stat­ed­ly brassy, a bit more sub­tle than many Cal­i­for­nia Pinots. We caught traces of mel­low herbs, pine and soft nuts. It was light on the nose, but had a strong fin­ish, open­ing nice­ly with some aer­a­tion.

We think these two prod­ucts pair well to­geth­er, but for the sake of safe­ty we sug­gest keep­ing the piz­za cut­ting to­wards the be­gin­ning of the wine im­bib­ing this hol­i­day sea­son.