It is the third Sunday of November. This week I wanted to make some Grandma pizza. I’m not sure how it got that name but I have trouble making a pizza that is called that. I’m not grand and I’m also not a mother so I’ve been calling it sheet pan pizza instead.

Making small pizzas for each individual is fun but it doesn’t feed a lot of people quickly. I wanted to try a pizza that I could make for social events when I don’t want to spend the whole time in the kitchen making pizza. Not that there are any social events happening right now, but I’ll be ready for when they happen again around this time next year.

Frank Pinello makes one of these pizzas at the end of his dough video but it was missing a few details. I decided to use the recipe as shown by Carla at Bon Appétit.

I measured out the dough ingredients for the recipe but weighed them and rounded as necessary. The recipe by weights is:

• 600 g all purpose flour
• 12 g kosher salt
• 1 packet of yeast
• 400 g water
• 20 g extra virgin olive oil

The instructions said to use a stand mixer but I was stubborn and insisted on mixing by hand. And the dough was so sticky that half of the dough got stuck to my hand. This is how my hand looked after getting as much dough off as I could:

It took five minutes to get my hand that clean. So I gave up and threw the dough into the stand mixer. The instructions say to mix until “soft and elastic and starts to pull away from sides of bowl”. It seemed to do that only with a minute of mixing so maybe I did a better job of mixing by hand than I thought. Does this look done? I’m not sure but I decided it had enough:

I scraped the dough off the hook, formed it into a ball, and placed it in an oiled bowl.

I then covered it with plastic wrap and placed it in the fridge overnight.

I pulled it out of this fridge today about an hour before baking time. There is supposed to be a picture here of how the dough looked after rising overnight but I totally forgot to take that picture. I do have a picture of how it looked after placing it directly on the oiled sheet pan:

The recipe called for using a quarter of a cup of olive oil in the pan but that seemed to me to be a bit much. I instead put down what I thought was a good amount and evened it out using my hand. I let the cold dough sit, covered, for ten minutes and then spread it out as far as I could. I then let it sit for another 20 minutes, stretched it out again, and then sit a final 20 minutes. I was then able to get it fully stretched out and looking like this:

Niles was down on the Eastern Shore yesterday and had some Ponzetti’s pizza with the family. He was discussing our pizza adventures and our never-ending quest to discover what is in Ponzetti’s pizza. His step mother then claimed that the sauce is Don Pepino as she has used it and can identify by taste. Niles sent me a photo of the can. I found it on the shelf of the grocery store this morning and I added it to my shopping cart. The real one, not the virtual one.

We were going to go simple with the cheese today. Just mozzarella. The recipe called for fresh mozzarella and I picked up the Galbani brand:

I crumbled the cheese, spread it out on the pizza, and made three stripes with the sauce. Niles says the stripes were too regular and needed some imperfections:

That went in the oven for twenty minutes at 525°F with a spin at the halfway point. It came out looking like this:

To me it was a bit overcooked and probably should have come out of the oven earlier. Niles like pizzas with extra crisp so this was his style. It was very difficult getting the pizza out of the pan. It was sticking pretty good in one of the corners. Next time I’ll use the full quarter cup of oil that was called for in the recipe. It took two of us to really wrangle it out of the pan. Here was the moment of triumph when we finally set the pizza free:

I cut it lengthwise in the middle and then down the other way four times to make eight slices. Here is a photo of a pizza slice from the side:

This pizza was delicious. It came out way better than I was expecting. And yes, that pizza sauce tasted just like the sauce on a Ponzetti’s pizza. We may have figured out one of the critical puzzle pieces needed to make that style. Terri even liked the sauce which was quite surprising since she really cannot stand Ponzetti’s pizza. Little T again peeled off the cheese from the pizza. I think the muenster cheese from last week scared him off:

The Galbani fresh mozzarella didn’t seem to add that much. Using the regular low moisture cheese would probably have given the same result. The dough may have been just a little too thick. Next time I’ll try it at 500 g and see how that goes. We will be trying that sauce again. Next Sunday.