It is the fourth Sunday of February. It also the last day of the month and a rainy one at that. I was by myself today for pizza and that is always a great time for an experiment. I wanted to see if I could make a Ledo style pizza. Thin, square, cheesy–what is there not to love?

The sauce is the easy part. That is sold at the local Giant grocery store:

The only problem with the sauce is that it is a huge bottle. It does say that it is their “pizza and pasta” sauce. I’ve never had their pasta but I guess I’ll make some up this week and see how it tastes with the Ledo sauce. I have a lot to use up.

Ledo’s advertises that they use smoked provolone cheese on their pizza. I didn’t get fancy on this one. I picked up the pre-packaged provolone slices that I use for sandwiches and cheesesteaks.

For the dough, I decided to use up the second packet of the special pizza yeast that I have. It expires in March, so if I’m going to use it, now is the time. I changed up the dough recipe and substituted butter for the oil. I asked Google what I should do and Tom Lehmann said to use 20% more butter than oil. That would be Tom Lehmann the Dough Doctor and not the other Tom Lehmann.

So, 20% more of three tablespoons is when it is time to pull out the scale. I put on one of the half-sticks of butter, which is four tablespoons, and got 57 g which is close enough to 60 g.

Three tablespoons is 75% of a half-stick which is 45 g and that is what I measured out. I totally forgot to add the 20% back on. This is why I find it so valuable to take notes.

It did say 45 on that scale. When I went to take the photo, it dropped down to 44. Close enough. I also weighed out the other dry goods this time around. Sugar came out to 8 g and salt was 5 g.

I used the stand mixer today and combined everything except the butter. I waited until it started looking like this to add the butter:

It took some time for the butter to incorporate. Next time I’ll soften it up some before adding it to the dough. It was looking soft but it wasn’t soft enough. I let the mixer knead the dough for four minutes after the butter was worked in.

I then split the dough into two equal halves. I bagged one of them and put it in the freezer for later. The other one I rolled it out into a rectangular shape until it was thin:

Why not use the Detroit-style pan for this pizza too? I first measured to see that the dough was stretched enough:

I then placed the dough in the pan. I trimmed the crust where it was too long and then shaped the crust in areas that were lacking. I should have made that upper right corner look better.

I let the dough sit in the pan for ten minutes while I went to work on the pepperoni. There was no “real” sliced pepperoni to be found at the Giant today. There was plenty of turkey pepperoni and I just cannot be tempted by that. I instead bought this stick:

Ledo pizza has thicker style pepperoni so I thought this would work well. I sliced up enough for one pepperoni per slice and dressed up the pizza. Yes, I did have too much fun with that cheese jigsaw puzzle:

It went into a 450°F oven for 15 minutes and it came out looking like this:

It definitely has that Ledo look:

And the underbelly was nicely browned:

This came out way better than I was expecting and it really felt like an actual Ledo pizza. The crust was good considering that it was a no-rise pizza crust recipe. Next time I’m going to try to use the standard dough recipe and see how that fares with this style. I do think that using butter instead of oil is key.