The Porky Pie

Barbecue pizza has a reputation problem, and most of it is deserved. Done badly it's a sugar bomb: sweet sauce, sweet onion, too much cheese, and a crust that's gone soft under all of it.

Done properly it's one of the best things you can put on a dough. The trick is that barbecue sauce is not a substitute for tomato sauce. It's a much sweeter, much more assertive ingredient, and it has to be treated as a flavor in its own right rather than as a base coat.

The idea behind it

Pork and stone fruit is a pairing older than barbecue. Pork chops and applesauce, ham and pineapple, prosciutto and melon, duck and cherries. Fat wants acid and sweetness, and fruit has both.

So the peach isn't a novelty here. It's doing the job that a slaw or a pickle does on a pulled pork sandwich: cutting through, resetting, keeping the richness from flattening out halfway through the slice. Peaches happen to be better at it than most fruit because they bring acidity alongside the sugar, and because they go jammy in a hot oven without disintegrating.

The pork is pulled and it goes on in a way that keeps some texture. Shredded to a paste it would just blend into the sauce. We want strands you can identify.

Mozzarella stays light, which is the other half of fixing barbecue pizza's bad reputation. There's already a lot going on. A heavy blanket of cheese on top of a sweet sauce and a fatty meat is where these pies usually go wrong.

What to expect when you eat it

Smoke first, then sweet, then a sort of bright lift at the end where the peach is.

It's a messy pizza in the good way. The sauce caramelizes at the edges where it meets the rim and goes slightly sticky, and those edge bites are the ones people fight over. The peach slices soften and the ones near the middle almost melt into the pork.

If you've had barbecue pizza that tasted like candy, this will not be that, and the peach is the reason. Taking the fruit off would make it noticeably worse, which is a decent test of whether an ingredient is earning its place.

When to order it

Peaches run through August and into September around here, with the Green Bluff orchards fifteen minutes north of town carrying most of the load. That's the window where this pie is at its best, and it's when we'd push you toward it.

Out of season it's a different and lesser pizza, so it comes and goes with the fruit. The whole calendar is in what Spokane grows if you want to plan around it.

It's also the pie we'd pick for feeding a group that can't agree on anything. Barbecue and pork is a crowd-pleasing combination, and the peach is interesting enough that the people who wanted something more adventurous are satisfied too.

What to drink with it

Beer, and specifically something with a bit of bitterness to push back.

A pale ale or a west coast IPA works because the hops cut straight through the sweetness. A pilsner works because it's crisp and gets out of the way. A dark, malty beer is the one to avoid, since it doubles down on the sugar already on the pizza.

If you want wine, go for something off-dry with real acidity. A dry riesling is genuinely excellent with this and nobody expects it. Rosé is fine. Big red wine is a mismatch.

Cider deserves a mention. Apple cider next to pork and stone fruit makes immediate sense, and the Inland Northwest has no shortage of it.

Why it's called that

Because it's a pie, and it's full of pork, and sometimes the obvious name is the right one.

We've thought about renaming it something more dignified and we're not going to. It's a barbecue pork pizza with peaches on it and pretending otherwise would be putting on airs.

If you want to understand the dough underneath it, crust matters is the reasoning and pizza basics is the practical version. The current menu is where you'll find out if the peaches are still around.