It is the first Sunday of October. I decided to make two pizza sauces for today. All the ingredients were the same except that in the first sauce I used Cento San Marzano tomatoes. At the Giant these cost around $4 per can. On the label it says, “Product of Italy”. Not sure if that means the tomatoes were actually grown in Italy or not. It then says “Pomodoro San Marzano” right below that to sound more authentic.

For the second sauce I used Furmano tomatoes. These cost around $2 per can. On the label it says, “Meet our Growers. The Schmidt Family Farm. Sudlersville, MD”. Not sure if that means the tomatoes were actually grown in Sudlersville or not. As far as I know the Eastern Shore only has chickens, corn, and soybeans. I even heard the population is ten chickens for each person.

I’ve been using the San Marzano tomatoes the entire time that I’ve been making pizza but I thought it would be worth trying some other tomatoes for once.

I made the full dough recipe with 1000 g of flour and pulled the dough out of the fridge at around 10:30am expecting a start time around 12:30pm. I made five dough balls of 280 g each and with the remaining dough I made two small dough balls for fun just in case. Niles and the kid ended up coming over a bit after 1:00pm and we probably started the first pizza around 1:30pm.

We decided to test the sauces first. One pizza would have one sauce, the other pizza would have the other sauce. We kept the testing pizzas to simple cheese, mozzarella only, with 80 g per pie. I still had the “Great for Slicing” cheese leftover from last weekend so I cubed the cheese again this time. The first pizza going in the oven:

And the pizza after cooking and after eating two slices:

The second pizza out of the oven:

I have noticed that the cheese is blistering more than usual and I’m wondering if that is a difference between cubing and shredding the cheese. That might be worth testing later.

I told Niles that the sauces were different but didn’t say what those differences were. He wasn’t able to really pick up on what was different between the two and said they both tasted pretty good. He also said we should have saved some of the first pizza for a side-by-side taste test but we were kind of hungry and ate the entire pizza quickly. I think I was able to identify the San Marzano’s as having a more acidic taste, but I was biased since I knew which sauce was which. I thought both were good but I didn’t see a huge difference between the two. I’ll still be using Cento San Marzano’s in the future, but using the Furmano’s made a great sauce too.

Now it was time for some toppings by adding in pepperoni, onion, and some hot banana peppers. And we were back to the 80 g mozzarella, 10 g of white cheddar, and 10 g of monterey jack cheese blend. But I was on auto-pilot, tossed the pizza in, and completely forgot about the toppings. I let it cook for about a minute and then I was able to get the peel underneath it, pull it back out, and place on the toppings.

After cooking we sprinkled a little bit of freshly grated parmesan and it was then ready to eat. Here is how it looked coming straight out of the oven:

That one was delicious. As you can see, the size of the pizza gets bigger as the day progresses along. The longer it sits out on the counter, the easier it is to stretch. But by this point in the day it really is getting poofy:

There was one carry out order today. We made an onion pizza for Mirah:

I was running low on mozzarella at that point and there was only 60 g left. I bumped up the cheddar and monterey jack to 20 g each to make it 100 g total. Lets see if she notices the difference. Or if Niles notices the difference when he eats the leftovers.

After pizza was done, Niles dropped off some egg rolls from Mirah as a birthday present for Terri. I “accidentally” dropped two on the floor and said, “Oops, I guess I now have to eat those”. Time for a walk to burn off the calories from everything I ate today.