×
×
homepage logo

The Hut has an even cheesier choice for cheese lovers

By Ken Hoffman - | May 9, 2013

This week I reached out for a wild ‘n’ Crazy Cheesy Crust Pizza, the latest mad plot to jam more cheese into America’s belly by the No. 1 pizza slinger, Pizza Hut, with 11,200 restaurants — one within your delivery area.

Remember Pizza Sliders from, oh, 20 minutes ago? Imagine 16 mini Pizza Sliders — or cheese pockets, as they’re called now — stuck to the outer rim of a large Pizza Hut pizza. That’s Crazy Cheesy Crust Pizza.

You just grab a cheese pocket and pop it into your mouth. In the NBA, this would be goaltending. In pizza, it’s more cheese. Go for it.

Here’s the blueprint: 16 cheese pockets surrounding a large, one-topping Pizza Hut pizza. There are two cheese pockets per slice.

Total calories: 390 (per slice of a Crazy Cheesy Crust Pizza with pepperoni). Fat grams: 20. Sodium: 910 mg. Carbs: 34 g. Dietary fiber: 1 g. Protein: 19 g. Manufacturer’s suggested retail price: $12.99. Not cheap.

Pizza Hut took a full year to create and develop the Crazy Cheesy Crust Pizza. This is about the 1,000th time the Hut has found a new way to push more cheese through your front door. It started in 1995, with the invention of Stuffed Crust Pizza. Now Pizza Hut isn’t bothering to hide the cheese. Bold, devious, brazen Pizza Hut.

The 16 pull-apart pockets are filled with Pizza Hut’s blend of “five Italian cheeses”: provolone, asiago, mozzarella, fontina and white cheddar. I wasn’t aware that the English village of Cheddar was in Italy, but this is a pizza review, not a geography lesson.

Why five cheeses … and why these five cheeses? This is what took Pizza Hut a year to decide. I could have made this decision in 25 seconds, the amount of time you get in the Fast Money round on “Family Feud.”

With 16 cheese pockets surrounding a pizza, the Crazy Cheesy Crust Pizza looks like an asterisk, or a daisy. This pizza loves me, this pizza loves me not. Start with “loves me not” — otherwise, you’re going to get dumped.

The Crazy Cheesy Crust Pizza is $3 more than a regular large Pizza Hut pie, and you’ll pay a caloric price for those cheese pockets, too. This pizza is a diet-buster — each slice is 80 calories and 7 fat grams heftier than a regular slice of pepperoni pie. It doesn’t come in a thin-crust version, so forget looking for calorie shortcuts.

You need to know: You can customize the pizza part of your pie as you wish, but the cheese pockets are not to be disturbed. They’re filled with cheese and nothing else — no sauce, even. They’re like small open-face grilled cheese sandwiches.

Also, while the Hut already has a Cheese Lover’s Pizza, topped with more and more of the same old mozzarella, the Crazy Cheesy Crust Pizza, with five different cheeses, is really the cheese lover’s choice.

Starting at $4.32/week.

Subscribe Today