Pizza sits alone in an unfuckwithable food category. Like a can cozey that says “A bad day of golfing is still better than a good day at work,” most people agree that even shitty pizza is still pretty good. So what happens when you take the power of pizza creation into your own feeble hands in service of trying to gross out your bro? Pizza vs. Pizza, in which two esteemed constables of pizza mastication, Dr. Tenderoni and Dr. Benji Mane, your two Madison correspondents, challenge each other to eat totes gross slices of the other’s creation at Roman Candle.

In this, the first edition of Pizza vs. Pizza, the rules had yet to be set. So hopefully in the future some stricter guidelines will be in place. Because for a couple of dudes who thought they could handle just about anything pizza-related, these seriously fucked-up slices straight ripped our chodes off and made us watch as they threw them through a plate-glass window.

Tenderoni: When Dr. Mane approached me with his idea of making totes fucked-up slices for each other at the refined and art deco Roman Candle (a joint located on Williamson St. in Madison that lets you create your own slice) I jumped at the opportunity. I have long savored making weird ass food/drink combos for my friends to eat, since it’s like waterboarding without the whole subjugating a people thing. So for this first go-round, I figured I’d bust Dr. Mane’s cherry by getting buck-nutty on the topping selections for his slice.

For Dr. Mane, I chose the anus-annihilating combo of walnuts (to add texture), Chipotle peppers (to add heartburn) and spinach (to add giant biceps). I reasoned that since Dr. Mane is like two years from getting AARP, he’d start crying as soon as he got one of those peppers in his grill, talking about how he’d need a Werther’s to wash them down. Then he’d be like, “Walnuts? Frown Face.”

Benji Mane: I’ve eaten some classy pizzas in my day. Pine nuts? Goat cheese? Shittake mushrooms? Sounds like my bread and butter. In fact, I bet bread and butter are the only two things I haven’t had on a pizza. So I was super confidant that my fancified palate was perfectly honed to handle the gourmet topping selection at Roman Candle, as well as conjure up a slice that would change Tenderoni’s gastrointestinal tract forever.

Going in, I had an ace in the hole; beets. After that, who gives a fuck what the other two topping were? I could have added tits and unicorns, and the beets would still have ruined that slice. But why take chances? Add garlic for pungency and add corn as a painful reminder that no matter what you do to it, it will still come out the other end looking exactly the same.

Tenderoni: It didn’t really dawn on me until we were giggling our asses off reading the menu, wondering aloud if we could ask for human on a pizza, that not only would Dr. Mane be subjected to crazy azz shit I concocted, he’d be able unleash some hell-fury on my colon, too. And holy shit, my colon just packed up my rectum and moved in with its sister. First off: Corn is not that bad on a pizza. It’s got virtually no profile, taste-wise, and its texture is similar to green peppers when put on top of cheese. And the garlic? Not so bad either, even though the cloves were overpowering and caused me to breath garlic (literal particles) for some time after finishing.

But beets on a pizza that isn’t related to The Office? The worst. Of all time. The beets were diced into cubes roughly a quarter the size of a standard craps dice, and they were big and wet just like [metaphor redacted due to fear of my mother reading this]. The beets also stained the cheese a Miami Vice pink, which should never appear on a foodstuff, unless that foodstuff is Philip Michael Thomas’s shirted corpse. Add to the fact that I have never, ever actually eaten beets in my entire life, eating the slice was like adding a foreign species into my lower intestinal jungle. I immediately had to wash it down with four grape-flavored Tums, which just added insult to injury, reminding of the time I spent on the purple serpent of a beets-topped pizza.

Benji Mane: Somewhere in the world, a pepper grows so hot that it will ignite your very soul if you even think about ingesting it. Professional torturers rub this pepper on a man’s genitals and he begs to be shot in the face. Compare the heat to having a laser refracted through a diamond and then having it strike you directly in the brain. But considering my soft American diet, that pepper might as well be the pussy-ass Chipotle.

Never one to tolerate massive amounts of heat, getting a slice that made my cheeks flush just sitting on the plate made me nervous. On top of that, the mushiness of those little baked devil dicks was offset by the icky crunch of the walnuts that Tenderoni so callously selected. Spinach is pretty gross, but compared to the red-hot buttfest tag team of the peppers and walnuts, it tasted like cotton candy. My apologies go out to the dude sitting next to us while I play-by-played this horrible eating experience.

Winner: Draw Neither competitor was able to finish their entire slice.

Madison, Pizza vs. Pizza, Roman Candle