It is the second Sunday of May. I’ve been doing a bit of experimenting lately so I thought today would be a good time to get back to the basics. At the grocery store this morning, I picked up a block of the low moisture skim milk mozzarella, some monterey jack, and some white cheddar. I have enough pizza sauce at the house and figured I would let Niles choose what sauce to use today. I haven’t made any sauce in weeks now. Maybe months. I need to work on that again sometime soon.

Niles asked me at 9:30 if we could move lunch up to 11:30. Fine by me, but that means it was now time to pull the dough out of the fridge and ball them up. I made enough for three pizzas and the dough came out as close to 275 g each as you can probably get. The small bit of dough is the leftover:

I took this picture of the dough balls getting ready for their rest but what I should have been doing was turning on the oven.

I totally forgot until about 30 minutes before. I ran up to the kitchen and turned it on. I knew that the underbelly of the crust was going to suffer due to this delayed start. The oven reached 550°F by the time Niles and Little T arrived but I usually give the stone an hour after that to fully warm up.

I shredded the cheeses and mixed them all up ahead of time. Back to the classic of the mozzarella base with 10% of that weight in monterey jack, and 10% of that weight in cheddar. So for 100 g of mozzarella, I added 10 g each of the other cheeses. We also added some freshly grated parmesan to the pizzas before placing on the other cheeses.

The dough was very stretchy today. I managed to stretch out to this size without much effort at all:

First pizza, as usual, was cheese and Niles said we should finish up the Ledo sauce that we have. This one came out looking beautiful:

This tasted really good and I think this cheese blend is a winner. It has been some time since I’ve had it and I kind of forgot how good it was. The underbelly didn’t brown all that well but it was better than I expected:

It was good but just missing a bit of that crisp. This pizza, and the other ones today, did catch on the stone a bit in the back of the oven. I’m not sure what caused this but I did have to work the peel some to pry them loose.

Now time for our favorite combination of toppings: pepperoni, onions, and banana peppers:

And eight minutes later:

This one fit the pan perfectly. I’m not sure what I did right today but I was hitting the correct sizes with ease. This pizza really hit the spot. I’ve really grown to be a fan of adding banana peppers. Two pizzas were enough for us today but we made a third one for Niles to take home. Going in the oven:

And in the box:

My pizza cutting skills were way off on that one. I missed badly in the center that it kind of looks like the Wendy’s triangle in DC. I bet that triangle tastes better though.