It is the fourth Sunday of November. And the last Sunday before the Thanksgiving holiday. Niles and I enjoyed the company of Don Pepino from last week so he was invited back. We wanted to find out how this sauce tastes in a standard New York style pizza so our plan was to start with a simple cheese pizza built the normal way. Then to try a pizza where the cheese goes down first with the sauce swirled on top.

Important tip: Do not place your plastic squeeze bottle next to your electric griddle.

I must have pushed the griddle back against it while it was still hot. It formed an interesting looking blister. I thought it has simply deformed the plastic but after I filled it up, oil slowly oozed out the side from a hole that was hard to see. Time for a replacement.

I used the 1,000 g flour recipe for today which yielded 1,646 g straight out of the fridge. I did a number crunch real quick and came up with 274 point 33, repeating, of course, for each dough ball. Somehow eight grams evaporates along the way as the sixth dough ball was only 268 g.

I could use my stand mixer to knead the dough but I enjoy the workout I get when doing it by hand. I do pull out the mixer when I have to shred cheese:

And look how nice it looks after being run through the machine:

I have had more than one person ask me if that is more work then using a box grater because it is more to clean. Don’t under-estimate how much I dislike shredding my finger or bashing my knuckles by accident which seems to always happen with mozzarella. I prefer cleaning more equipment.

The first pizza was the standard one. Here it is on the peel:

And the out of the oven:

It could have been stretched more as it is didn’t come close to hitting the edges of the pan. The bake on this was close to perfect. Well done without being overdone. This was out of the oven after seven minutes. I checked at six minutes but it wasn’t quite there yet.

This week we are in agreement again that this pizza sauce is the one used on Ponzetti’s pizza or it is really close. The ingredient list on the can wasn’t helpful for providing insight on what makes this sauce taste the way it does. All I know is that the can claims the tomatoes come from New Jersey.

The pizza went quickly. I managed to snap this photograph before it was completely gone:

That pizza was good but it was time for the next one. The next pizza had the cheese placed down first and we increased the cheese from 100 g to 120 g. Sauce was then swirled on top. It was a bit thick and it wouldn’t really pour. I scooped out sauce with a spoon and tried to form a swirl the best I could:

And we put on some pepperoni. Hormel brand this time. Always check to make sure the pizza slides free before attempting a launch. I spilled some sauce in the southwest corner and it was anchored to the peel. I brushed off the excess, placed a little more flour down in that spot, and tried again. The pizza came off the peel cleanly and eight minutes later:

Just a simple change between two pizzas can cause a big difference in taste. I prefer it this way as one bite can be loaded with sauce and another bite can be loaded with cheese. The Hormel pepperoni is good and better, in my opinion, than the Boar’s Head and Bridgford brands. Mama Mary’s might be the best so far but I haven’t seen it at the store lately.

Niles now said that we should thin the sauce to make it pourable. I pulled out the blender, dumped in the sauce, added some water, and mashed the button until it got to the consistency we thought looked good. I also changed the cheese blend to 50 g of mozzarella, 50 g of provolone, and 20 g of monterey jack.

The first thing I noticed when this pizza came out was that I didn’t swirl enough of the sauce on. The second thing I noticed is that there was a lot of cheese separation. I got the cheeses mixed up and instead of using monterey jack, I used cheddar. The taste of that was too strong. I took one bite and didn’t finish my slice. Niles and Zach were still hungry and they didn’t mind. No slice was left behind.

We finished out the day with another cheese pizza. The dough is stretching nicely at this point:

Delicious as always.

I placed the two leftover dough balls into plastic containers and I’ll try to make some more pizza this week. I normally portion off extra dough as soon as I pull the dough out of the fridge. Not sure how they will be after resting on the counter for three hours. I guess I’ll found out sometime this week.