Winnah of da winnah pizza

Here’s what you do at the Kapiolani Community College Farmers’ Market: you walk around until you find some good grinds, sit and chow down, then walk around looking for something else to eat. Repeat until full.

I didn’t even try to finish my loco moco chili. Way too much starch and carbs. What was I thinking? I needed to cleanse my palate. So I wandered over to Two Hot Tomatoes to have some of Barbara Sant’Anna’s fried green tomatoes.

Frankly I’ve never been a big fan of fried green tomatoes (okay, the tomatoes are green and there’s just something unappealing about that, and, secondly, the crust is always mushy), but Barbara’s secret trick is to fry the tomatoes in a panko breading so they come out crunchy and airy. More like tempura.

Those were good (although, again, I didn’t bother to try and finish the whole thing). Then, after grabbing a fresh gingerale lemonade from PacifiKool, made from their Hawaiian-grown ginger syrup, I got in line at the North Shore Farms booth for a slice of Jeanne Vana’s pesto Neapolitano  tomato and mozzarella pizza. Probably didn’t need this since I still hadn’t digested the loco moco chili (if, in fact, that’s even digestible) or the fried green tomatoes, but what the hell.

There are two things that make North Shore Farms pizza winnah of da winnah (best of the best): Jeanne’s Waialua Big Wave tomatoes, which she grows only in winter on a 10-acre farmer’s co-op on the North Shore on land that used to be a sugar plantation, and her pizza oven—which is actually just a portable gas bbq grill.

Jeanne calls her pizza Neapolitano, probably because, like a true Neapolitan margherita pizza it’s made with just four ingredients: tomato, mozzarella, basil, and olive oil. But Jeanne’s bbq’s don’t get hot enough to turn out a true crispy crust (a true Neapolitan pizza gets cooked in a 900° stone oven for less than two minutes). So while her crust is a little more limp than I like, the Big Wave tomatoes are unbelievable. A true loco moco pizza.