It is the second Sunday of November. When I was at the grocery store picking out cheeses for today I bought another cheese I normally don’t use. Muenster. Someone once told me that Little Caesar’s pizza uses this cheese. The last time I had that pizza was at a friend’s house when I was taking classes at the university. That was in the 90s. We went to his house to watch a VCR recording of a Wrestlemania match from the 80s and ordered two of the three foot pizzas. We laughed at the commercials. Even in the 90s, the 80s were considered weird.

The first order of business was to replace the burned out bulb in my oven.

Replacing it was easy. Finding a new bulb proved to be more difficult than expected. I first went to Lowe’s. They had appliance bulbs but not the 40 watt bulb in the configuration that I needed. I then went to Home Depot and they didn’t have any kind of appliance bulbs. Not sure why. Maybe they went too in on the LED craze. I finally went to Walmart and they had plenty. I should have gone there first.

When I got home from my morning hike, I pulled the dough out of the fridge and then out of the bowl. It was looking dolphin smooth today:

The yield was 815 grams. Since we were going to do some testing with muenster today, I portioned the dough into four balls. Two at 135 g each, and the other two at 272 g. I used the same 135 g number that was used in the last Sunday of October testing. Writing blog entries is great for forcing me to take actual notes that are readable.

After coming to room temperature for two hours, the dough looked like this:

Niles and Little T arrived around 1:30pm and we started baking right away. The first test pizza had 20 g of mozzarella, 15 g of muenster, and 10 g of monterey jack. I took a quick picture of the pizza after launch:

This baked quickly and it got pulled out after six minutes:

You could definitely taste the muenster cheese but I didn’t like this blend. Niles didn’t like it either. Little T solved that problem by pulling off the cheese:

Maybe it was too much muenster. I might need to grab a Little Caesar’s pizza again to remember how it tastes. We decided that one test of the muenster was enough and put it back in the fridge.

After five weeks straight of forgetting to purchase the perfectly paired beverage that goes with pizza, this week I remembered to grab it when I was at the store:

Niles missed out on the first tastings that I did with provolone in September. I had some leftovers from last week’s sandwiches and we combined 20 g of that along with equal portions of mozzarella and monterey jack. Straight out of the oven:

That was good. Now it was time for the two 12" pizzas. Niles said we should go up to five cheeses. We combined 40 g of mozzarella with 20 g of provolone, cheddar, and monterey jack, with a sprinkling of parmesan underneath.

It was also time for some pepperoni toppings. I was out of the Mama Mary’s and again picked up something new this time:

I always get a good chuckle out of these “Gluten Free” labels. I’m waiting to see bottled mineral water as being “Gluten Free”. It may be free of gluten, but it is going on a pizza crust that has plenty of gluten.

There was a wet spot on the peel which can be seen in the lower left hand corner. It got bunched up there and I didn’t notice it until I went to launch the pizza. It came off the peel but got stretched along the y-axis.

Halfway through after flipping it around:

And out of the oven:

The blend was good and we both liked it but adding the additional cheese may not be worth the effort. The cheddar was too strong and something else needed to come through. Maybe more provolone next time.

It was a little greasy from the pepperoni but I am fine with that. This pepperoni brand was simply okay. It had a very “pepperoni” taste. Not sure what else to say about it. We will give it a try again next week and see if I have more words for it.

We then finished the day making a pizza for Niles to take home with him. This is how puffy the last dough ball was looking at that time:

It started to develop a crust on the edges:

But the final product came out looking delicious:

Now I need to work on my pizza cutting skills. The center of those cuts are nowhere near the center of the pizza. That pizza looks really good though.