It is the third Monday of January. I asked Niles if he wanted to come over for pizza this Sunday but he invited us over to his place for pizza and egg rolls instead. I can’t say no to that.

Today was a holiday and I had some pizza sauce to use up. Why not have some pizza again today and make myself a pie? Actually, I had pizza on Saturday too. We went up to Pub Dog in Westminster and this is what I got:

So today was going to be three days in a row with pizza. Sounds good to me.

Ken’s brother, Mike, has been making Detroit-style pizzas lately and has been sending me photos of his delicious work. I asked him what pan he was using and I then asked for one as a Christmas present. Here it is:

I’ve never had an actual Detroit-style pizza so I don’t know what it is supposed to taste like. Mike pointed me to Buddy’s recipe. I already have sauce and Wisconsin brick cheese isn’t something found at my local Giant. I decided to follow the dough recipe and just top it with the sauce and mozzarella sitting in the fridge.

I measured out the flour by weight and that came out to 400 grams. The water was 340 grams. That is a lot of water so I could already tell this was going to be a really sticky dough. I planned on using the stand mixer today but in an absent-minded moment, I started combining the dough in a regular bowl.

At this point I transferred the dough to the mixer bowl and this is how sticky the dough was:

The recipe says to run it in the mixer for eight minutes and to check regularly to see if the dough is sticky. I already knew that was going to be the case. It said to add more flour a spoonful at a time and I added about four spoons. It was still quite gooey at the end:

The pan pizza dough recipe that I followed some time ago came out looking like this too. Buddy’s recipe seems to indicate that it should be a lot firmer but that would have been a lot of added flour. I decided to use it as-is and see how it goes. In to the bowl for a rest:

After thirty minutes, I cut the dough ball in half and placed one of them into the pan which was lightly oiled and sprinkled with some oregano and garlic salt. The dough was nice and spongy at this time but I wasn’t able to stretch the whole way. I covered it and let it sit for another twenty minutes. It was then showtime:

I got too excited and started to make a mistake by putting the sauce on first. I quickly corrected my error, placed on all of the cheese, and then put down two lines of sauce:

That went into a 450°F oven for fifteen minutes with a 180° rotation half way through baking. Here is how it looked straight out of the oven:

It took me some time to free it from the pan but nowhere near as long as it took me the first time with the cast iron skillet. The pizza has some lovely char on the side:

And the underbelly:

The pizza was good for my first attempt but it needs improvement. I put on way too much sauce. The top stripe there could have been called Lake Ontario and the bottom stripe could have been Lake Erie. Whatever amount I think is correct, I just need to cut that by half. And the dough was a bit underdone. It was a little doughy but I didn’t find any uncooked parts. It probably could have used another minute or two in the oven if the cheese could survive.

That was fun. I’ll be doing this again.