It is the second Sunday of February. Niles has been itching to try some of this Detroit-style pizza so I decided to make more this weekend. The plan was to make two pizzas today. These pizzas are hearty enough that two should be plenty of pizza for us to eat.

I doubled the recipe from last week and then added three more spoonfuls of flour. My notes are not clear if those are supposed to be small spoons or large spoons. I ended with going with 460 g of flour this time for 340 g or water. It looked fine in the mixer until about halfway through the kneading. The dough, once again, started pooling at the bottom. I added two more spoonfuls (this time writing down they were small spoons) and the dough came together nicely at the end:

I hope to have the final amount of flour nailed down for next time. It was noon when I covered up the dough and I was expecting a start time around 1:15pm.

I used up all the colby jack from last time but I found some individually wrapped cheese blocks in the fridge:

These measured out to be a little over 20 g each which is perfect for pizza. From now on, when I use colby jack, I’m going to buy these. A bigger block doesn’t get used up quickly enough in this house before going bad. I cubed one stick of the colby jack and then shredded 100 g of mozzarella for the first pizza.

Niles and Little T showed up on time today and time was of the essence. Little T was heckling me with a chant of “pizza, pizza, pizza”, so we had to start baking right away. The dough was looking good:

I cut it in half the best I could, placed the one half in the pan, and covered the remaining half for later:

Little T only likes cheese pizza so that was the first one in. The store-bought Classico sauce was still sitting around in the fridge so we worked on using that up today:

The recipe calls for an oven temperature of 450°F. This Sunday, I actually remembered to do that. I’m so used to setting the oven to 550°F and that was the temperature I used last week. I’m wondering if there will be any noticeable difference. The pan went on the stove-top for 5 minutes and then went into the oven for 15. It came out like this:

I ended up burning my finger pulling this out of the oven. I didn’t have good coverage with the pot holder and halfway out I started to feel the burn. I could have dropped it, but pain is temporary, delicious pizza is forever. I pulled out the big guns for next time:

Little T was at first confused by this style of pizza. He asked “what happened to it”, but after one bite he was a happy customer:

The second pizza was a repeat of the SuperBowl pizza–pepperoni, olives, and onions. Niles said the cheese was a bit light on the first, so we upped the mozzarella to 120 g. It is already looking good:

The smell of pizza baking is the best when there are onions involved. This ended up taking two more minutes to bake but those extra minutes were worth the wait:

Niles posed for a quick photograph to show the crust underneath:

That slice looked great, but I did have one that was a little overdone on the bottom. Five minutes on the stove-top might be a bit too much. I’ll try four minutes next time. I didn’t notice a difference in taste with the cooler oven temperature. Both temperatures seem to work well.

Niles really enjoyed these pizzas and preferred the one with the toppings. I agreed, and then we had a ten minute philosophical discussion on the the meanings of toppings and how they apply to different styles of pizza. Is this a style that works better with toppings are do we need to simply up the cheese game? Some questions are not easily answered.

This concludes the Detroit-style pizza trilogy for now. There will be more in the future. Not next week, but definitely before the return of the Mandalorian.

I should also share that I ordered a Pizza Hut Detroit-style pizza on Friday evening:

This pizza was horrible. And this is the opinion of someone who still eats Ellio’s pizza on a regular basis. Something wasn’t right with the sauce. It had a weird smell when I opened the box. The sauce had an off-taste to it too. I couldn’t quite place it. The only thing I could think of was that the sauce wasn’t cooked. It tasted as if it was dumped on after coming out of the oven. The sauce is supposed to go on last, but it is still supposed to go through the oven. I think that off smell was the same smell you get when opening canned tomatoes. It isn’t a bad smell, but your pizza isn’t supposed to smell like that. I ate two slices and then threw the rest away. Maybe it wasn’t cooked enough, maybe a mistake was made on this pizza, maybe something else was wrong? I don’t know, but I do not want to try again. Let me know if you have a better experience.