Before you embark on the fiery habanero journey, there are a few things to keep in mind. In addition to the random advice and wives’ tales about ways to reduce the burn, there are actually some factual methods to increasing your enjoyment… or, should we say decreasing the pain?

1. Start “training” now! Eating fresh jalapenos and other chili peppers can help you build up a tolerance to the capsaicin so you’ll be ready to face our habaneros in August. We offer fresh jals for our pizzas year-round, and they are already starting to get a little hotter (peppers get hotter through the season – we even notice the habs getting hotter as the end of the month rolls around at the end of Habanero season).

2.When the time comes, and you are sitting at a table facing a slice of Habanero Pizza, make sure you cut and eat your habanero pizza with a fork.

A. If you pick up the slice of pizza, you’ll get some the pepper oils on your fingers, which can then easily spread to your eyes and nose when you later try to wipe away the sweat and tears from your face. Your eyes and nose will burn furiously if you touch them with even the tiniest bit of pepper oil on your fingers.

B. The other reason to use a fork is that you can more easily get the entire bite in your mouth without it touching your lips. Your mouth, throat, and stomach will all be on fire – there’s no need to have your lips on fire too. Once the oils start to spread around your lips, there’s not much you can do besides spread ice cream around your face to help soothe the burn.

3. Beer can make some folks feel a bit braver than they would be otherwise, and sometimes a shot of bravery can come in handy when facing a slice of habanero-drenched pizza. Other than that, beer really doesn’t help put out the fire. It tastes great, it can help dislodge some peppers from your teeth and move them along their merry way, but it doesn’t help quench the burning.

4. Milk and ice cream are both excellent for counteracting the infamous capsaicin in the peppers that builds the fire. Even if milk or ice cream normally gives you intestinal woes, you might not even notice because of the insanity that comes about a day after the habanero, so it might be worth it to go ahead and reach for a pint of cold milk to wash down your hab bites.

A slice of the Triple Hab!

Soothing ice cream!

5.Avoid drinking water to cool the heat – it just ends up dispersing the oils around your mouth instead of neutralizing them.

6. Cold breadsticks are really effective to help “scrub” out the oils from your mouth. And it gives your stomach something normal to digest along with all the fire. (Cold, meaning not piping hot out of the oven. The last thing you need is oven-hot burning on top of the pepper-hot).

7. And when you are done with your habanero pizza, GO WASH YOUR HANDS. And then wash them again. Make sure that your hands are thoroughly cleaned of habanero pepper oils before you go to the bathroom. There’s no amount of ice cream that will help you if you don’t.

Pizza jacket and pizzas, ready to box up	At the Post Office
Upon arrival	They cooked up beautifully!

We can send overnight pizzas anywhere USPS offers overnight service. Another option is FedEx, but it’s easily twice as expensive as the post office. And we’ve had wonderful service and success with the post office, so that seems to be the way to go!

In 2008 we changed the way we ship pizzas. We used to use dry ice and a Styrofoam-lined box, but after countless hours of very careful research, we upgraded to frozen gel packs and an insulated pizza jacket. Before this change, we averaged about two shipments per year. Since we improved and systematized our shipping method, we’ve done 28 overnight pizza shipments, and we only lost one! (It was during the holidays and the airplanes were iced over – it was a disaster. The pizzas finally made their way back to us…a week later! Ugh! The whole thing, damp cardboard box, thawed half-cooked pizzas and all, went straight out to the dumpster.)

Fun Facts:
The most expensive box we’ve shipped, so far: $196.87 through FedEx for two larges to Honolulu, HI. (This doesn’t include the pizzas or shipping materials).

The most expensive shipping through USPS: $107.90 for two larges and two mediums to University City, MO.

Our most famous recipient: The crew editing the the Man v Food footage for the Boise episode… they got hungry and called in an order! Four larges: Zambini, Chile N Lime, Vegy and Zerto.

Heaviest box: 24 pounds 11 ounces. (This was a box of four larges)

Farthest distance: Honolulu (3305 miles) followed by Philadelphia (2440 miles). We have had customers take frozen pizzas home with them (including at least one batch to Alaska), but as far as the pizzas we’ve shipped overnight, the farthest is to Hawaii. Years ago we helped someone package up pizzas to transport to New Zealand, but they arranged for the transportation. (There are strict rules about international shipments of perishable food, so we just leave that one alone. We only ship within the United States.)

Longest Drive: To Walla Walla, WA. When Lesley got the Post Office to ship the box of pizzas, it turns out there is no overnight service from Boise to Walla Walla! Since we’d already promised these pizzas to our customer, Lesley hopped in her car in drove the 9 hours, roundtrip, to deliver the pizzas. (And now Step One when taking an order for an overnight pizza shipment is to make sure they are in an Overnight Shipment area!)

Ready to ship some amazing pizzas overnight? Give us a call at 208-376-3455 or send us an email to comments@flyingpie.com.

Throughout our 33 years, we’ve attracted wonderful customers who continuously do amazing things, for us and for each other! There’s something unique about our customers – we tried to capture it in a reader board:

Here are some of the amazing things our customers have done over the years:

1.   A customer ordered a 20” Combo as a thank you for a very nice lady whom he’d met while attending her garage sale. That pizza weighs 8.4 pounds – that’s one heck of a “Thank You!”

2.   While on a double (one delivery driver taking two different orders on the same trip), the driver’s car broke down on his first stop! That customer was so upset that the next customer might not get their Flying Pie pizzas that he flat out insisted that the delivery driver borrow his car so he could deliver the second batch of pizzas.

3.   We received this funny package in the mail, with a short note explaining a member of their party had accidentally taken home the playing card.

4.   Duane sewed the pizza-with-wings quilt that is proudly displayed at the Fairview store. He brought in the pizza quilt and then a little while later came rushing back, asking if he could take back the quilt – he’d forgotten to sew wings on it! The delightful quilt got its wings and came back to us completed.

5.   While out on delivery, the delivery driver’s car got repossessed (pretty low, huh?). The compassionate customer let the delivery driver wait in their house and use their phone since his cellphone was in the repo’d car. They even offered him a beer (one of the 6-pack he’d just delivered) and let him watch Spongebob Squarepants with the kids while he waited for someone to come pick him up.

6.   While waiting in line, a customer heard the couple behind her talking about it being their first visit to the Pie. When she got to the front of the line and ordered her pizzas, she asked the sales person to use the last two pizzas on her Five Pack card to get the new customers their first Flying Pie pizzas.

7.   Last year, on the last day of Habanero season, we sold out of habanero pizzas about mid-way through the dinner rush. Many folks who waited until the last day to come in for a habanero pizza missed out entirely! A friendly customer met some folks who’d missed out on hab season, and very graciously gave them each a slice of his own habanero pizza so they could have a chance to try it.

8.   While on delivery, the driver’s lower radiator hose blew and spewed antifreeze everywhere! The customer gave the pizzas to his kids, and then took the delivery driver to the auto parts store so he could get new supplies to fix his car. The customer even helped him fix the car! His response, when the driver tried to make him go eat his pizza, “Nah, that’s what microwaves are for.”

Seriously, who does this? We have amazing customers.

At the end of every shift, the Crew Leader looks at all the comment cards that came in during their shift and adds any extra notes or information that they have. At the end of the week, the Store Leader looks at all the comment cards that came into the store during that week and adds info or tracks down missing pieces to the story, and then turns in the whole pile.

Every week the Marketing Director looks at all the cards that came in from both stores (we get about 350+ between the two stores). We tally up the number of total cards, the number of cards requesting a reply and we also calculate the average referral score of the cards (after taking out all the “infinity” “1,000,000,000” and “11” scores.) We call the referral score the “average satisfaction score.” We figure customers who put a 9 or a 10 in the referral box are quite satisfied! Our average satisfaction score for one week ranges from 9.6 to 9.9. After we’re done playing with the numbers, the comment cards that want a reply go in one direction and all the remaining cards go into a stack to be considered for our monthly comment card displays in the stores.

Referral score/Customer satisfaction

We write about 30-40 replies every week, both hand-written and emails. We love being able to directly connect with customers and answer their burning questions about Flying Pie. It’s fun when we hear that our letters are displayed proudly in bedrooms or on the fridge. Sometimes they even make it into a frame! It’s quite flattering. And sometimes we even get a letter back! We have great customers.

Letters from our awesome customers

As for the rest of the cards, we use about 80 per store in our comment card displays. We try to put up as many as we can, so sometimes we cut them in half (especially if the card had an amazing drawing and no words). When the in-store comment card displays are dismantled, those go into another pile that becomes the selection we choose from for the bi-annual menu’zine. The number of faces/drawings that get in the menu is usually around 60. (So out of roughly 8400 comment cards, 60 of them get into the menu!)

We also scan 14 drawings to use on our website (they’re in the “What’s New” drop down menu) and we update this collection regularly.

Lesley told Howard about the cool idea and together they set out to explore the boundaries of this new concept.

Over the next three months of tasting, testing and developing, we experimented with a dozen variables ranging from the positioning of the garlic inside the Zappi (under or above the spinach), to how we roasted the garlic in the first place. We tried using sourdough (the default dough for Zappies) and settled on Original because there’s garlic in it! We experimented with adding Mrs. Dash (an ingredient in the DBG pizza); we played with the amounts of onion, artichoke hearts, and zucchini until we found the perfect amounts; we tried adding pretzel salt to the top, like a garlic bagel; and, most importantly, we tested the amount of garlic.

We had to ask ourselves: How much is too much garlic? It is, after all, called the Death: By Garlic Zappi and it needs to be food folks will love having multiple times.

The recipe Dillon started us with used a total of 9 cloves of garlic: 7 roasted, 2 chopped fresh. That’s no scrawny amount of garlic: 9 cloves! To bracket it, we had to know how much is too much. So, we tried it with 15 cloves (12 roasted, 3 chopped fresh). The next day, the tasters shared tales of woe – we resolved that when the garlic lasts into breakfast the next morning, it is simply too much! Turns out, the perfect number is one dozen cloves of garlic: 9 roasted and 3 chopped fresh.

We were pretty confident about the dozen-clove Zappi and decided to have an unveiling for the crews. And then after a few more tests we were ready to unveil it to our customers. We put out sign-up sheets in the stores and collected a dozen willing victims. We gathered together one Sunday afternoon and tasted the new Zappi. All the tasters agreed that the balance of garlic was optimal, and this included feedback from one guest who is a self-proclaimed “garlic fanatic!”

The succulent Death: By Garlic Zappi is built on an olive oil glaze, with fresh spinach and zucchini, artichoke hearts, roasted garlic, romano and provolone cheese, chopped onion, and fresh garlic. We are proud and confident that it’s the most fun you can have with a dozen cloves of garlic.

P.S. While many people missed days of work due to cold or flu, none of the tasters fell ill during the 3 month testing of this Zappi.

Sure, you can make pizzas at home (we also sell our red sauce, pesto, pepperoni, mozzarella, and basil!), but what else can you make with our dough balls?

Here are some tasty ideas:

Our original dough has a smidgen of garlic in it, so it works well for savory kinds of things.

Prosciutto & Gruyere Pinwheels

Pineapple-Sausage Pigs-in-Blankets

Garlic Knots with Romano cheese

The whole wheat dough has a smidgen of brown sugar in it, so it works well for sweet things like cinnamon rolls! These ones have butter, cinnamon, walnuts, raisins, brown sugar, and more butter! (A one-pound dough ball fills up a 9 x 9 pan, whether it’s cinnamon rolls or garlic knots.)

Cinnamon rolls

Please feel free to share your dough ball ideas, discoveries and photos!

The current collection has 248 names… here’s A-C:

A. Paul Ling
A.B. Ginner
Aaron D Tires
Ada D. Zert
Al E Cat
Al O Vera
Alfredo D Dark
Amanda Hugginkhiss
Amanda Lynn Player
Angie O’Graham
Ann Arky
Ann Chovie
Ann Cillary
Ann L Gessick
Ann Tannah Ball
Anna Conda
Anna Phalactic
Anne Teeter
Aunt Eeder
Auntie Biotic
Austin Tatious
Ava Lanch
B. Z. Beaver
Barbie Quer
Barry Treasure
Bea Futtle
Bea Willder
Beau Hunter
Ben D Rules
Ben Dërdundat
Bessie Everhad
Bill Trite
Bonnie Lysover
Brett N Butter
Bri Theezier
Brianna Ritz
C. Quester
Cam E. O’Rolle
Candi Barr
Carmen Getit
Carrie O’Key
Cayman Wendt
CD Barr
Charity Case
Charity B. Guin-Sattome
Chase Tafter (Bounty Hunter)
Cheyanne Meak
Cheyenne D. Muir
Cher F.
Chris P.
Cici Ryder
Claira T.
Claire Annette Player
Claire Voyant
Claire & Preston Danger
Clarence Sale
Cora Spond
Cory O’Graffer
Crayton Havoc
Chris P. Critter
Crystal Ball
Curtis C. Carr
Cy Attica
Cy O’Narra

Our slice pies are par-baked (partially cooked) and when you order one, we toss it in the oven and cook it hot to perfection. There are a variety of toppings that you can add to our lunch slices to get some extra pizzazz! The only exception is ground meats, because they don’t have enough time to fully cook in the oven (the par-baked slices only take 2-4 minutes to cook). You can get a normal slice, or a fancy slice, all dressed up to your liking. Extra slice toppings are 60 cents each.

Some popular lunch slice add-ons:

Jalapeños: We have two kinds of jalapeños (fresh or canned/pickled), and both make excellent slice additions! The fresh jals are excellent with the Vegy Slice, and the canned jals add an extra layer of flavor to the Fromage slice (or vice versa)!

Garlic: Roasted or fresh? We roast our own whole cloves of garlic in the pizza oven. They make great additions to slice pies. Roasted Garlic on a Pepperoni is a popular combo, as is Roasted Garlic on a Vegetarian.

Tomatoes: We have lots of different kinds of tomatoes here – sundried, fire roasted, sliced, and diced. You can get the sliced tomatoes cooked or fresh. Howard learned of a tasty combo from Michael Deeds: Fresh Tomatoes on the side of a Vegetarian slice. When he asked Howard what slice he had one day in the last few years, Howard told him and he said, “Hey, you got that idea from me!” Indeed he had, many years before. It remained one of Howard’s favorites all these years.

Green Olives: An extra salty tang with a pepperoni slice will perk up your day!

Pineapple: The sweet juicy pineapple goes great with the Gouda on the Fromage, on a pepperoni slice, and combined with Jalapeños too!

Ham & Pepperoni are both wonderful add-ons for lunch slices.

 

 

A slice of Fromage A Trois with fresh jalapenos and fresh tomatoes

A slice of Pepperoni with Roasted Garlic

A Slice of Vegetarian with Green Olives and Sundried Tomatoes

P.S. The lunch slices range from $2.25 to $3.25 and from 3:00-3:30 the remaining slices are just $1 each. The $1 slices are a sweet after-school snack or dinner for later!

All of our Specialty Pizzas have a beer and wine that goes excellently with them, complementing the flavors of the pizza sauce and toppings. These beers and wines are listed in the menu, on the website, and at the bar in the restaurants. When we have a need, we’ll sit down and do a pizza/wine or pizza/beer cut. (The beer and wine cuts are a very, very rough part of the job.) We learned that tasting four different wines at a time is just about the limit – past that, they all just taste good and the subtly of the flavor blends are lost.

One of our most favorite wine and pizza pairing is the Fromage á Trois pizza and the Two Princes Riesling. The Two Princes Riesling has a bright sweetness to it that practically sings when combined with the smoked Gouda that’s on the Fromage a Trois. The other two cheeses, provolone and sharp cheddar, the homemade red sauce, and the special blending of herbs on the pizza all unify with the crisp tartness of the Riesling and it snaps together like two puzzle pieces. Perfection!

Another excellent pairing is the Oxford Landing Chardonnay with the Samoan. The Chardonnay has a light sweetness that’s just enough to compliment the juicy pineapple on the pizza, bring out the full flavors in the Canadian bacon, and hum right along with the smoked Gouda.

One time Craig added some jalapeños, and that worked really well too, but it needed something to balance the spiciness. We kept coming back to roma tomatoes. Once we tried it with way too much garlic – eating a second slice actually put beads of sweat on our foreheads. Very slowly, over perhaps 6 months, the recipe developed. As it came into balance, the last two adjustments were to increase the tomatoes slightly, to make the pizza less challenging to consume.

When the pizza recipe was set, to the hundredth of a pound, we tried it out on Gourmet Night, where it received an enthusiastic reception.

The name for the pizza came from a late-night semi-inebriated customer who pointed right in-between a Zappi and a Zeppelin on the menu, and said, “Give me that Zambini.” Crew Leader Scot Johns was the Flying Pie-er who captured the name for future use!

The Zambini debuted in the 1987 menu, and quickly developed a loyal following. Among those loyalists, Dave and Sheila Mills stand out as remarkable. Dave and Sheila started to call in orders for 10-12 Zambini pizzas at a time, requesting that they be frozen. It took awhile to get the story behind these mysterious batches of Zambini pizzas. We learned that Sheila and Dave are the owners of Rocky Mountain River Tours. Sheila is also the author of several delightful Dutch oven cookbooks, based on the unreasonably stunning food they create for guests on their critically renowned 6-day Middle Fork Salmon River raft trips. Dave and Sheila would buy the pizzas while in Boise, and transport them up to Salmon, to share with folks on special occasions. Dave and Sheila have done this multiple times a summer, every year, for over 20 years now. They have introduced hundreds of people to Flying Pie, and the Zambini pizza!

Dave shares: “P.S. We have been known to place a Zambini on the engine air cleaner to heat it for dinner while driving from Boise to Salmon City…a 5 hour drive and we get hungry.” This makes it easy to recognize Dave and Sheila as “Customers most in love with the Zambini.” Sheila even developed a Dutch Oven Lasagna, inspired by the Zambini pizza, which is dinner on the first night of the 6 day trip through the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness!