It is the first Sunday of November. And the first day of November as well. I’ve baked pizza five weeks in a row, which is probably a new record for me, and decided to take a break this Sunday. I’ll instead discuss the pizza I made this week using leftover dough.

The pan pizza dough recipe is enough for two pizzas but I only have one cast iron pan. I saved the other half of the dough for some mid-week pizza. Wednesday ended up being the night and here is how the dough looked after pulling it out of the fridge:

I fired up the oven, put the dough in the oiled pan, and covered it about two hours before baking time:

I still had some Mama Mary’s pepperoni left so I put that on the pizza, but for something different, placed the pepperoni on first:

Yes, there is more than one way to put pepperoni on a pizza! My favorite place, Ponzetti’s Pizza, does it a third way by placing the pepperoni on top of the pizza after it has baked. The residual heat from the pizza softens the pepperoni gently. You lose out on the crispness and char but the flavor is a lot more complex and good in a different way.

The cheese went on top and completely covered the pepperoni:

Five minutes on the stove top and then nine minutes in the oven and this is how it came out:

There is a lot of blistering on the cheese and I would say this should have come out of the oven sooner. A little blistering adds character but this is too much. The gooey parts that were there pulled nicely but there wasn’t enough of them. Next time I’ll check at eight minutes. And I need to replace the oven light that has burned out. Even the underside looked a little over done and would have been fine if pulled out a minute sooner:

Putting the pepperoni underneath was not a good idea. At least with this pepperoni and this style of pizza. Most of them got completely lost inside and I didn’t even notice they were there. Except for one of them that didn’t cook all that well and was too chewy. I’ll try the Ponzetti’s style again the next time around.

After talking about Pizza Hut last week and saying I had to give them another try, I did. I ordered a large pan pizza with pepperoni, onion, and black olives:

Another disappointment. The crust did not have the color, crispness, charred bits, or flavor that I really used to love:

My pizza, even when slightly overcooked, tasted so much better. With so many other options around for pizza these days, I don’t know when I’ll be ordering Pizza Hut again. Maybe again after five more years.