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Free vegan pizzas today at Blaze

It's not every day that you can walk into a pizza joint and get a free pizza, especially if you want one that's 100% vegan. But today is just that day.

It's not every day that you can walk into a pizza joint and get a free pizza, especially if you want one that's 100% vegan.

But today is just that day, as Blaze Pizza at Drexel University (3400 Lancaster Ave.) celebrates opening its second Philadelphia location (the first is at Temple University) with a special deal, to wit: "Anyone who follows Blaze Pizza on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat will be eligible for a custom-built, personal-sized pizza on the house. "

The offer is good all day, from 11 a.m. to midnight, and if you're at all curious about this "artisanal pizza concept," or if you're at all hungry, it's probably worth a quick trip to Lancaster Avenue. I was there for the preview and found it intriguing - and tasty.

So what's it like? Kind of like ordering at Chipotle - but instead of a handful of potential burrito/bowl components, you're choosing everything for the staff to build your pizza, starting with the crust (regular or gluten-free - both are vegan), to the several sauces, to the cheese (Daiya for the plant-based set), to the 947 different possible toppings.

OK, that's just a guesstimate - I'll admit I lost count in all the hurly-burly - but there are quite a few, from your basic veggie options of mushroom, onion, green pepper, and olives to more esoteric options - word to the wise: Be sure to try the roasted garlic.

In any nonvegan restaurant serving vegans, there's always a question of how serious they are about avoiding cross-contamination, and I was pleased to see that Blaze seems pretty serious on this. From the point the crust was about to receive sauce, a worker with freshly donned plastic gloves supervised the individual pizza through the different stations so that none of the components would be touched by gloves with cow's-milk cheese on them. Once assembled, it was then fast-fired (sorry, "fast-fire'd" to use the special trademarked phrase) and cut into slices with a pizza cutter dedicated to vegan pizzas.

All the careful spectacle would be irrelevant, of course, if the pizza wasn't worth eating, but mine was certainly fresh-tasting and flavorful, with a thin, crunchy crust and an authentic overall regular-pizza taste. Your mileage may vary, according to which of the 1,771,561 different combinations (again, a guesstimate) you choose in building yours.

One quibble: The salads are generally uninspired lettuce with nonvegan accouterments. There seemed to be one option that was vegan but none of those salads were available. Maybe in the future Blaze, as an obviously forward-thinking establishment, will look at the possibility of adding vegan versions of easily veganized dressings (such as Caesar).

Either way, it's good to get more vegan pizza options in town, and stay tuned, because there are more to come. By the beginning of 2017 Philly should have vegan pizzas available at 742 different venues.

Again, a guesstimate.