It is the second Sunday of December. I was by myself today so I planned on using some of this special pizza yeast we have sitting in the cabinet:

Terri was the first one to find yeast back on the shelves during the early weeks of the pandemic and bought a whole bunch of everything–the standard active dry yeast, the rapid rise yeast, and this special yeast for making pizza. I haven’t used it yet and its going to expire in a few months so today seemed like a good day to try this out.

My phone kept pestering me to visit breadworld.com as I was taking this photo because of the QR code. I finally went to visit the site while writing this entry. Well, I went to breadworld.com. It sort of just hangs and it feels like the system is down. I started poking around and its DNS entry points to an Amazon Web Services EC2 instance, but if you use www.breadworld.com, it points to an AWS load balancer in us-east-1. The page at www.breadworld.com/pizza returns a 301 response, moved permanently, with a forwarding address of fleischmannsyeast.com. A blanket redirect. How disappointing.

The next packet down has a recipe:

A 30 minute pizza. I was skeptical but figured it was worth a try. I was so skeptical that I didn’t invest the time to make a sauce. I also kept the cheese sealed in its wrapper until I had a viable dough on the peel.

A range of 1¾ to 2¼ cups of flour is quite large. I picked 2 cups, measured its weight (which was 280 g) and then rounded up to 300 g. I find it funny when recipes on the Internet list metric conversions but do not have the courage to round.

I then dumped in the entire yeast packet. That is a lot of yeast:

I followed the rest as-is but weighed out the water. That was 150 g after rounding. The water is 50% of the flour weight which is much less than the 65% for the Pinello dough. After four minutes of kneading, it looked like this:

The outer skin of the dough starts forming a hardened crust quickly so when this is ready, just keep on going. The final measurement on the dough was 498 g which is too much for a single pizza. I split that into two separate dough balls.

The dough was too tight for me to work by hand. I stretched it out the best that I could and then used a rolling pin. When it got to the desired thinness, it looked like this:

I then cubed up some cheese, spread out some Classico pizza sauce, and topped it with some pepperoni and thick rings of onion. I also pinched around the edge of the pizza for some flair.

Halfway during the bake:

And straight out of the oven:

The first slice:

I was quite surprised. It was a taste that I was not expecting. A taste like a Pizza Hut Thin & Crispy. In my childhood, before I discovered the greatness that is Ponzetti’s, the Thin & Crispy pizza was the only pizza I would eat. And I loved it.

In a few places it was a little doughy and felt undercooked. If you look closely in the picture above, you can see a gummy line of dough in the crust. Out of habit, I cooked it at 550°F when the recipe called for a longer cook at 425°F. I’m not sure if that makes a difference, but worth trying next time.

The signature feature of a Thin & Crispy is the air pockets that hold their shape and crisp up nicely:

I was expecting this pizza be boring and bland at best. I was prepared for a disappointment but this pizza was actually quite good. If you are looking for a New York style pizza, do not follow this recipe. For something that has that Pizza Hut Thin & Crispy feel, give it a try. I want to explore this more in the future to try and get my own Thin & Crispy, but better.