[Photographs: I am Shamurai.]

I love this taste-test done by two Chicago expats living in San Francisco. David Ayman Shamma and Daniel Raffel put together a panel and had "a scientist and cognitive psychologist specializing in human-computer interaction" design the sampling and rating protocols:

On December 12th, we gathered our 12 testers in total. Entrepreneurs, product managers, engineers, scientists, designers, a pizzaiolo, a librarian and a lawyer rounded out our collection of people from around the bay area; half of these testers identified themselves as those who prefer New York pizza over Chicago. Three cheese Chicago-style pizzas were brought in locally from: Little Star, Patxi's, and Zachary's. The 2 shipped frozen and reheated from Chicago were Lou's and Gino's. All these pizzas were of Chicago Deep Dish style--not the "stuffed" variety. Dr. Churchill, who was not taking the test herself, designed a ' pizza score card ' to measure peoples judgement on each pizza on a 1-5 scale: Appearance, Smell, Texture, Taste, Finish, and Overall-loving-feeling. Each pizza was presented unbranded on a standard pizza board labeled only with a number. Each taster drew numbers from a hat to determine the order in which they tasted pizzas. This helps to control the error of the pizzas getting cold as they sat out.

Among the tasters was Pizza Hacker, a dude familiar to regular Slice'rs.

Long story short, SF-based Patxi's came out on top, but do click through for the whole shebang.

See also: Deep Dish Worth the Wait at Little Star »