It is the third Sunday of August. I had no plans for this Sunday. Niles was free. Ken was free. That means it is time to bake some pizza. Everyone showed up at around noon and Little T and Little D joined us as well.

Yesterday afternoon I made the standard batch of 1000 g and placed the covered dough ball in the beer fridge overnight. My sister made pizza last week and texted me with a question about the dough recipe. She wanted to know if the dough is divided when it is pulled out of the fridge or after sitting on the counter for two hours. It wasn’t clear on the web page but it is divided when the dough is removed from the fridge. This is the dough before the two hour rise:

They do expand quite a bit so make sure to leave plenty of room between them. This is how they looked two hours later:

Someone else was asking me questions on how I stretch out the dough. It can be kind of hard to explain that in words so I handed my phone to Niles and told him to start filming:

That dough was used to make the first cheese pizza of the day. All dressed up and ready to go:

At the grocery store this morning I saw there were blocks of cheese that had a combination of monterey jack and colby jack. I wanted to give that a try today because I was getting a bit tired of the cheddar and that was one less block to purchase. I still had an unopened pack of some skim milk mozzarella at home and I put that to use today. The blend for these pizzas was 100 g of the mozzarealla and then 20 g of the monterey and colby jack. I planned to make sauce yesterday but I was out of canned tomatoes. I instead picked up a bottle of Ledo sauce.

After seven minutes of baking, we pulled out the first pie and it was looking great:

Last pizza day we noticed a better bake on the stone that was closer to the bottom of the oven. Today I adjusted the rack so that it was in the lowest position and that worked some magic on the underbelly:

It was nice and crispy all the way around the pizza. Niles held up a slice for the bend test:

It is sturdy enough to hold but not as rigid as a board. This pizza tasted really good and we really liked the cheese flavor in this blend. Little T managed to get a nice cheese pull on his first slice:

That got us wondering if there is a world record for cheese pulling. I found a site claming it is 14.5 inches. If that is the case, then I think Little T takes home the silver medal.

Pepperoni, the ever classic crowd pleaser, was next. Nothing fancy this time. I picked up the Boar’s Head brand and didn’t do any pre-cooking. This is how it looked before going in the oven:

And this is it coming out of the oven:

The grease from the pepperoni is sure to let you know where is the thinnest spot of the pizza. It will pool there if it is not even throughout. I cut way the first slice to let Lake Pepperoni drain out a bit:

We all agreed this was delicious and that pepperoni juice just makes things taste better. There was some nice charring on the pepperoni edges too that gives it that distinct flavor.

Up next was a vegan cheese for Ken. He brought the same cheese as before but he didn’t semi-freeze it this time. He thought that it may have impacted its ability to melt. This time he shredded it straight from the fridge and it really does look like real cheese:

This one ended up staying in the oven for the full eight minutes and was looking quite good when it was done:

Ken said it tasted good. I’ll take his word on that. One of these days I might give it a try but I’m more likely to try the tuna pizza again first.

We then made some simple garlic sticks by brushing on some olive oil and giving it a sprinkle of some garlic salt:

It was pointed out to me that I was being lazy here because I had real garlic in the kitchen and should have used that instead. They still tasted good anyway and the kids liked them.

The final pizza for the day was a simple cheese pizza for Niles to take home with him:

The scale flipped out when I was adding the cheese for this one so I decided to just wing it with the proportions. I think it had a little too much of the secondary cheese but it looks good to me.