It is the last Sunday of September. Niles is out of town this weekend so I made a small batch of dough which normally yields three dough balls. I decided to do some cheese blend testing and instead portioned the dough into a single 280 g ball for a 12 inch pizza and then four balls each at 135 g for the various blends.

I’ve been bouncing between 270 g, 275 g, and 280 g for the 12 inch pizza and I’m going to stick to the higher side for now. I also increased the kneading time from five minutes to ten minutes and finally got around to trying out the windowpane test. That actually works–I saw the windowpane. I may have forgotten to halve the yeast from the six ball recipe as the dough was a bit puffy today.

When making the sauce I normally dump the entire contents of the canned tomatoes into the blender. I keep coming across people on the Internet who say that you should throw away the liquid that comes in the cans because it is bitter. I decided to do that this time around and ended up with half the yield.

Zach joined in for the testing this week. The first pizza was a standard 12 inch with 80 g of low-moisture skim mozzarella, 10 g of mild white cheddar, and 10 g of Monterey Jack. I didn’t bother shredding the cheese and cubed it instead.

Going into the oven:

Coming out of the oven:

It didn’t quite make it out to 12 inches and the dough was a bit thicker than usual. Sprinkled a bit of Parmesan to finish it up and the taste was great. Zach was the first to say that the seasonings in the sauce were more pronounced this time and in a good way. I wonder if the recipes I was looking at expected the liquid to be thrown out and I wasn’t putting in enough. I didn’t notice a difference in bitterness though. We might have to do a liquid vs no-liquid test sometime in the future.

Blend #1

First blend was 50% of mozzarella and 50% of smoked provolone. Or it was supposed to be. I screwed up and made double the necessary blend and then pulled half out of that. Hopefully that was still 50/50.

I picked this blend because Ledo Pizza advertises that they use smoked provolone so it would be fun to try and find that taste. Today wasn’t the fancy cheese. It is the same pre-packaged slices that I use when making ham sandwiches or cheesesteaks:

The 135 g dough balls came out to be the perfect size for smaller pizzas to test cheese blends with. The first out of the oven was this:

This tasted good. The provolone taste was definitely in there but it was kind of muted. Zach said this was his favorite in the blend testing done today.

Blend #2

This time we went for 100% of the smoked provolone. I had my doubts on how this would taste. I kept thinking it would be like my ham sandwich without the ham.

After I placed the pizza in the oven, I decided to place the peel on the toaster oven. Which promptly slid off, knocked a bowl off the counter, and that bowl shattered when it hit the floor. This is the same bowl Terri told me that morning that I should be careful with and not use it to scramble eggs. Well, its a scrambled bowl now.

Then pizza came out looking like this:

I thought it tasted way better than I expected and we actually ate the entire pizza. Terri came down to see what all the commotion was about and I talked her into trying this pizza. She actually liked it and noticed that the sauce tasted better but maybe it has a bit too much garlic.

I’d select a different provolone cheese if I were to try this again. While I can now recognize that Ledo pizza has provolone in it, this wasn’t even close.

Blend #3

Next up is 50% mozzarella and 50% Monterey Jack. This blend was to get a better sense of how Monterey Jack tastes on a pizza as I truly believe this is a cheese in the ever elusive Ponzetti’s Pizza.

Out of the oven:

And the taste was quite bland. Yes, the Monterey Jack was there but ever so subtle. It felt like there was more smell of it while it was cooking than taste to it when eating it.

Blend #4

This time we tried 50% mild cheddar and 50% Monterey Jack. I left it in the oven a bit too long and got quite a bit of cheese separation (which I think is from the cheddar):

Zach said this was his second favorite of the night. I thought it was too much cheddar. Some bites were fine, but those with too much cheddar were not all that great.