It is the first Sunday of December. It is a great day for making pizza before the holiday rush is upon us. It has been some time since we last had some Detroit-style pizza so I thought that would be good for today’s agenda. I had to be somewhere at 4pm so I told Niles and Ken that we should start promptly at noon.

This dough recipe uses the fast acting yeast with a thirty minute rest before baking. I wanted to make enough dough for at least three pizzas so I started one batch for two pizzas at 11:20am and then the second batch after the first pizza landed in the oven.

The dough was really sticky today. I put a bit of extra flour in while it was mixing but it still wasn’t enough:

I kept putting more flour in until it became workable:

I think the recipe provided by Buddy’s simply has too much water in it so I’ll have to adjust the numbers a bit and see what works better.

Can openers these days are horrible. This is the third can opener we’ve had in the past two years and this one barely works anymore:

It was too much effort to open that can that I tossed the opener into the garbage bin. I saw that a new can opener has appeared in the drawer but it was too fancy for me. I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work:

I used the mixer grater attachment today for the cheese and the plastic hopper broke off of that. I wasn’t having a luck during prep today.

I finished up the cheese with a hand grater and quickly remembered why I got the mixer attachment in the first place. Grating that kind of cheese is not fun at all. Maybe Santa will bring a new one.

The first pizza, as usual, was a plain cheese one. It looked like this all dressed up and ready to go:

It was placed on the stove top burner for 5 minutes and then sent to the oven for another 15 minutes. After that, it looked like this:

The side looked great even though the thickness was a bit uneven at times:

This pizza was almost there but it just fell short of excellence. The center was a bit under done and the bottom crust was a bit too soft. The sauce tasted really good though. I kept with the doubled amount of black pepper that Niles liked. I though I had garlic but it had gone bad so I substituted the garlic cloves with minced garlic.

We decided to up the baking time for the second pizza. Before the bake:

We added an additional minute to the stove top time and two for the oven. This one came out with a lot more char on the side:

This was cooked all the way though but that char was a bit much. It is possible to have too much of a good thing. The bottom was still a bit too soft.

The third pizza was a vegan cheese one for Ken and I decided to put more oil in the pan to see if that would get the bottom to brown some more. I forgot to get a before picture but I do have one as it came out of the oven:

Ken really liked the melt on the cheese and said this was the best Sunday Pizza Kitchen pizza he has had so far. It looks like that the additional oil helped out as this was the best looking under belly of the day:

We were all full at this point so there was no fourth pizza. I put the remaining dough in a zip lock bag and tossed it into the freezer for a pizza later this week.