It is the first Sunday of December. During the week Niles talked to somebody in the ‘Bury who worked at Ponzetti’s way back in the day. He drilled him for information and was able to confirm that the pizza sauce is from Don Pepino but with some additional seasoning and thinned out with some water. He also found out that the fat added to the pizza dough is shortening.

I’ve never bought shortening before. I think the only time I used it was in Boy Scouts and I think we were frying something in the actual Crisco can. That was so long ago I cannot recall the details. It may not have even been food that we were frying.

I wasn’t sure how much shortening to use in the dough but a quick survey on the Internet indicated that two tablespoons was probably good for 500 g of flour. I measured out the amount and placed it in a small bowl. I also wasn’t sure of the best way to add it to the dough so I decided to nuke it for a minute until it was melted. It was so clear that it is hard to even see it in the photograph.

I normally measure the water and olive oil together in the same cup and then dump them into the dry ingredients. Why not do the same thing here? I let the shortening cool a bit but when it hit the water it solidified immediately in a dramatic science experiment kind of way.

I mixed that the best I could and continued to make the dough. I’m not sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing to do.

We used the Pepino sauce as-is when making the sheet pan pizza. It is a chunky sauce and is too think to pour. The next pizza day we watered it down a bit to where we were able to make some sauce swirls. Niles had heard that the Ponzetti’s ratio is one can of sauce to one can of water. We tried that for the first pizza.

The first pizza was a disaster.

The sauce was way too thin. I didn’t try to put this much on but it sort of jumped out of the container as I poured the sauce. You can see some islands of white where we tried to compensate by adding more cheese. It kind of looked like a can of SpaghettiOs. There was so much sauce that if you passed out on this pizza, there would be good chance that you would drown.

We should have cut our losses at this point and tossed it out. We were stubborn and continued anyway. It was so watery that when the pizza hit the oven, a tidal wave formed, raced across the surface, and crested over the crust towards the rear.

The tidal wave then receded under the crust. When the pizza was pulled out, it left part of the underbelly behind where it fused with the stone:

The stone got pulled out of the oven right after this photo. That amount of burn was enough to set off the smoke detector. We put in the other pizza stone and let it come up to temperature for about twenty minutes. The final product was a bit of a mess:

We cut some slices out of the good side of the pizza and took some bites. The sauce was so watered down that it lost most of its flavor. It tasted like sauce you would find on an Ellio’s pizza. The dough had a different taste and it was definitely the taste we were looking for. Little T ate all of this pizza that we put on his plate. He didn’t even pull off the cheese this time. Maybe because he couldn’t find the cheese in all the sauce.

The carcass of that pizza looked like this:

I have a backup can of sauce for incidents like this. I also have a backup for the backup which is a can of Classico pizza sauce. We reduced the water to a half and the consistency looked much better.

This time the swirl kept its form:

Out of the oven:

This ended up being too much sauce but it actually had some flavor this time. We added some additional spices and some sugar, but at one and a half tablespoons, the sugar made the sauce too sweet. Next time we will try less.

For the last pizza of the day we used less sauce and this was the best of the afternoon:

This pizza was overcooked on one side and undercooked on the other. I did flip this pizza around at four minutes. I guess I flipped it all the way around? Terri and Zach came home while we were eating this pizza and they each tried a small slice. Terri really liked the crust made with the shortening but agreed that we had added too much to the sauce.

Our experiments from today are showing some good results in the quest for a homemade Ponzetti’s Pizza. We aren’t there yet but making good progress.