Damn 
This makes so much sense with photos I’ve seen, and some breads I have made.
After posting about bread sticks, up thread. I really wanted some, so I made up some pizza dough. They were a welcome addition to tonight’s soup.
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Even gluten-containing breads will brown less if they have insufficient gluten formation
… which is why gluten-FREE pizza crust usually looks fairly pale. 
Dumbing down the discussion with my shameless use of prefab ingredients, here I go:
Bred prefab crust, Rao’s Pizza Sauce, Tillamook “farmhouse shreds” (nice and thick) mozzarella, and some roasted veggies retrieved from my freezer…
Preheated my pizza stone for 40 mInutes; the Bred instructions said bake longer for a crispy crust. I did a dry run with just sauce and cheese yesterday and crispy crispy is just like a matzoh pizza. Just don’t do it.
Chewy crispy is much better.
I was appropriately restrained with the volume of toppings. I like the Tillamook cheese. My grocery is usually out of the mozzarella, though. The Rao’s sauce is tasty and not salty.
The finished pizza. I was very satisfied with the results, considering the components were mostly prefab.
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Please join us in the voting for the February 2024 COTM:
If you’re in a pinch and need to use bagged pre-shredded cheese, I think those heavier/chunkier ones are the way to go. Tillamook, like you had, but also Sargento and a couple of others have been available around here for a few years.
Might just be my imagination, but with the larger/chunkier pieces, I think they use a lot less of the cellulose anti-caking stuff per bag.
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(Repost of “What’s for Dinner” post, ignore if you’ve already seen it)
Sunday night pizza, just the wife and me. I stuffed the edge crust with whole milk mozz slices which worked pretty well - last time I tried string cheese pieces (which were part-skim) and it basically just disappeared into the bread. Topped with slices of jalapeno stuffed green olives, sautéed button mushrooms, the “cup” style pepperoni, with a bit of diced up sun dried tomatoes under the cheese. Cheese was primarily Galbani whole milk mozz, plus I microplaned some parm and asiago (which went under the mozz because I don’t like the scorchy taste of overcooked drier cheeses).
I called this Niagara Falling Pizza because I was fiddling around with something else and let the dough over proof and get floppy on me and that one corner of it wouldn’t fit on my pizza stones, making a bit of a mess in the oven and causing me to pull it out about 3 minutes before I normally would have. I need to get a large rectangular steel. Still, great flavor combo.
P.S. I don’t know if it’s the lighting, or my phone messing up, or some combo of both, but it looks like I’ve got mustard around the perimeter. That’s the red sauce and it looked a bit orange-y, but not nearly that yellow.
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So how do you stuff the crust… do you just roll it out flat, add the cheese to the perimeter and wrap it over? Or is there another method?
Pretty much that’s it except that I often try to leave some of the puff around the perimeter rather than flattening entirely (this time I did just flatten it all, though). And I have a small finger bowl of water to dampen where the dough surfaces are supposed to adhere together, although sometimes it springs back open here and there as it cooks. If still puffy on the edge I sort of gently pull it out enough to cover, then fold over the finger of cheese.
Using “fingers” of cheese is why this one turned out fairly rectangular. The dough was pretty close to circular when I started the process, but I was using cheese chunks that were roughly 1 cm square by about 10 cm long rectangles (whatever the full width of the Galbani block is). So as I’d get each one enfolded it would kind of straighten out the crust. I suppose if I both wanted stuffed crust and a round pie, I’d gently warm the cheese chunks first so they’d be more likely to take an a curved aspect.
It’s just something I started doing for the kids about 20 years ago or whenever Pizza Hut came out with stuffed crusts, and I’ve been feeling a bit nostalgic lately. My only excuse for doing it twice in 2 weeks is that I wanted to see if my memory was right, that whole milk mozz is better than using split string cheese mozz (and it is).
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Can’t you buy the strings in whole milk?
Pretty sure you’re right - I’m nearly certain I’ve gotten Galbani and Frigo “Cheeseheads” brands in whole milk. But I’m heavy into half-price shopping (which my current 2 bags were), and for just eating them, no one seems to care.
What they do care about is that I also got some gouda single-serve sticks at the same time (no “string” aspect to these, just sticks). A couple of weeks ago when the kids were all here, they cut one stick into 4 pieces, and decided that was enough of that.
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Well I am currently working on my second one… New (less hydrated - more kneaded) dough, sweeter sauce (little sugar, salt, red wine vinegar), bottom rack with no convection. We’ll see in about an hour. (c;
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Cool. It’s strange to me that with all the great recipes you’ve refined on your website, you’re just now branching out into making your own homemade pizza. OTOH, “one thing at a time, dangit!”.
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I’ll be the first to admit I am not a baker. I do a few things I really like (cornbread, cheesecake, pita, muffins, cookies) but that is about it. Pizza has always seemed a bit esoteric to me, and so far it has been a failure (although I do english muffin/flatbread ones).
We’ll see how try two goes in about 20+ minutes.
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yesterday . . .
rotate the pix or tilt head . . .
seriously overloaded.
tomato schfutt
pepperoni
onion
mushroom
sweet pepper
black olives
cheese
non-soggy crust
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Sam’s sells 'em, and cheap, but I think they might be part skim.
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I needed to use up some leftover pizza dough, so I made a sliced black olive pizza. I think I was a little too heavy handed with the cheese, though. Still a nice tasty pizza for dinner!!
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I almost never say there’s too much cheese!
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Another experiment with my pre-fab ingredients … this time with my little air fryer.
My goal was to come up with something that resembled a wonderful white pizza with pesto and artichokes that was made by a local company years ago and available frozen at a few select stores. They also evidently served it fresh at a couple of colleges. It has long since disappeared- but the memory lives on.
The ingredients - the Bred pizza shell (cut with scissors to fit the tiny air fryer). Cucina & Amore Bruschetta Atrichoke, the last of my Tillamook mozz, and a little diced onion.
This makes literally 1 serving in my tiny air-fryer-for-one. Yes, I heartily recommend parchment liners.
Just shy of 4 minutes @400.
Nice snack! Very close to what I remembered. Maybe a sprinkle of dried basil and a grind
of parm nest. I sprinkled a little diced onion on the top, and the pizzeria favorite red pepper flakes at the end , because I could.
Almost as fast as ripping open a bag of potato chips, and IMO far more satisfying. And a win for my little air fryer.
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