It is the first Sunday of November. This autumn has gotten busy and we were having a difficult time finding a weekend we could all get together. Today was the first time in over two months that we were able to do it. The goal today was to keep it simple and try to keep mistakes at a minimum. Niles brought over Little T and Ken brought over Little D so I planned on making enough dough for six pizzas.

I made the dough yesterday using the standard recipe and it felt a little stickier than I remember. Normally, I would throw in a little bit of flour to round it out. This time I decided not to. I was able to knead it for the full ten minutes and the final result was still a bit sticky. I oiled up a large bowl, wrapped the dough ball inside, and placed it in the beer fridge overnight.

I wanted to make some sauce but I didn’t have any canned tomatoes on hand. I bought some at the store today but I didn’t have enough time to make it. The tomatoes will have to wait for next time. I picked up a large jar of Ledo sauce for today instead.

The crew showed up around noon and I spent the next forty minutes or so cubing cheese and talking way too much. I should have started much earlier but the end result looked nice:

The dough was puffed up quite a bit already. I took it out of the fridge at 10am. Since we really didn’t start baking until 1pm, that should have come out an hour later.

The first dough ball didn’t come off the pan cleanly and I struggled to stretch it properly. It ended up being very uneven. Too thick on one side and too thin on the other. My attempts to fix that made things worse and it ended up in the garbage can.

I took my time extracting the next dough ball. I put a lot of flour on the dough scraper and kept it as circular as I could during transport. This one worked out well. A little bit on the smaller side but I didn’t want to push it too much. The first pizza, as always, is straight up cheese:

Seven minutes later, it came out of the oven and looked like this:

There were a lot of bubbles on the crust. I’m wondering at this point if I put in too much yeast. It doesn’t matter because the dough tasted really good today. I’m not sure if the stickiness was the magic but something was going right today. I even remembered to place the stone on the bottom rack and got a great looking undercarriage:

The kids were really excited about this pizza too:

A pizza for the grown ups was next: pepperoni, onions, and banana peppers. This one wasn’t as round as I hoped but it did stretch out a bit more than the last pizza.

The pizza got stuck to the peal due to some banana pepper juice. I put some flour on that spot to help it move but it wasn’t enough and it resulted in a uneven launch:

This pizza took a full eight minutes in the oven to bake. We got some great char on this one:

It may look a little off but it tasted really great. It was a bit watery and I probably should have drained the peppers more. The taste was there though. I think this is now my favorite pizza topping combination.

Up next is a vegan cheese pizza for Ken. He brought over his own cheese and I must say that this is a good looking vegan cheese pizza:

And when I say good looking, that means I looked at it. I didn’t try it today. Ken really likes the flavor, Niles said it was pretty good, but my mouth was having a good day so far and didn’t want to spoil that.

We planned on another cheese pizza but I had issues stretching this dough as well. It got way too thin on one side and holes started poking through. This got re-purposed for some breadsticks instead. Some olive oil, some garlic salt, and you have this:

After about six minutes, they came out of the oven:

That really burnt spot was where the dough was too thin. For a pizza, that would have caused problems. Here we could just cut around it. I poked the dough quite a bit with a fork to try to pop some bubbles but it still came out bubbly anyway.

The last dough ball was looking rough but there will still a pizza to be made.

I thought I did a great job at stretching this one. I totally forgot to take a picture before I launched it in the oven. This one got snagged on another wet spot and came out lopsided. Niles says it looks like the Millennium Falcon:

Overall it was a fun pizza Sunday. Everything tasted great but I could use some work on the execution. Next time I need to improve on time management with the dough and to make sure I keep the peal dry while dressing the pizza. We are planning on another pizza day for the first weekend of December. I’m already looking forward to it.

As a side note, a pizza was ordered from Domino’s this week. It was a “contactless” delivery and they now put your pizza on a “pizza pedestal” instead of placing it directly on the ground. I’m not sure if this is a brilliant idea or a waste of cardboard: