Love it, opinions and all!
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Haha! Good idea - I’m lucky because I don’t use the broiler for my pizza, but I’m pretty sure if I did, I would not have thought of trimming.
Until the smoke detector went off, of course.
ARRRGGGHHH!!!
Thank you. I cannot believe that this didn’t occur to me. But it never did.
I added it in my Word doc for this recipe. Problem is, it’s so simple that I don’t refer to the doc anymore, so here’s to hoping I don’t forget your suggestion by the next time I make it.
ETA - Memory Solution: I’m down to 1 kid still here this week (the gluten free one) so I’m going to make a white sauce and spinach/caramelized onions pizza tonight using her KA GF pizza flour.
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I actually find that parchment tends to inhibit leoparding somewhat (although you got great color on your recent cheese pizza!). I use this instead: https://superpeel.com/ Much easier than a traditional peel!
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For my “TIL File” - I had to google leoparding - thought it might be a typo but couldn’t figure out what it could be a typo of, but then found it’s kind of a term of art in the pizza world.
I wonder how the parchment affects the cooking? Does it curl up and maybe shield the crust edges? Anyway, I went back and looked at a bunch of my photos, and they’ve all got some scorchies on the high points (similar to the photos in this thread), so somehow I’m avoiding the problem but I don’t know how. Maybe just because I’m running around 580°F or so (when making pizza I fiddle the calibration and add 35 degrees, which is the most I can do).
That peel looks interesting, but it seems they may have quit making them (their “shop” page has several versions of their peels, but they all link to Amazon which says “out of stock no clue when coming back”). But I can mimic the mechanism easily enough with a double-length piece of parchment. Might give it a try tonight.
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That could be it - my oven doesn’t run that hot. I need to see if I can recalibrate for pizza - time to bust out the owner’s manual!
If you like the parchment for transferring the pizza to the stone, but feel it is somehow impacting your bake, you can always yank the parchment out of there after a couple of minutes, leaving the pizza in direct contact with the stone. Once the crust is set, it’s easier to get the pie back on the peel without parchment than it would have been to get it off the peel without parchment.
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Your crust looks great. But do you mind me asking why there is so little cheese/sauce on it?
Back Story: the best pizza I have ever had was after a gig I was working in L.A.… when after we were done for the day and I was looking to get out of there - producer and other engineer said “you’re going nowhere until we grap some pizza”.
They ordered the pizzas from a place down the street (Luigi’s) with extra cheese and “sightly extra sauce”. Each slice was dripping with cheese pull and sauce and was so good I was convinced that ordering any toppings would ruin it (I hit this place up for the same thing as often as possible).
Now even though I have a pizza stone in my oven (which I used for T&B pizzas when we had a good T&B spot up here), I have never made a real pizza from scratch, mostly 'cause most/all of the online recipes/methods I’ve seen are light on sauce and cheese… but this is the kind of pup I wanna make. Is this just something not doable in a home oven?
The very best pizza I ever had was when I was early teens, visiting Meriden, CT. My Italian relatives only ate plain cheese pizza. My uncle walked in with an intoxicating smelling pizza, said it was from his cousin Sally in New Haven!
(I’ve not yet eaten pizza in New Haven.)
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I’m no expert on NY pizza but from what I understand there is not a huge amount of cheese (and sauce) on it compared to other styles. E.g. the picture in this article https://www.seriouseats.com/new-york-pizza-slice-history and https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-pizza-slices-in-new-york-city-5181643 and also in the Richard Eaglespoon article linked.
Also, I had 2oz blocks of aged mozz already measured out 
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I grew up on NY pizza, and I can confirm that it traditionally doesn’t have much cheese. That’s what I didn’t understand about the popularity of the original Rays on 6th Avenue in the mid-1970s–it had so much cheese that people were using plastic forks to twirl it up like spaghetti.
Here’s what NY-style pizza looks like at Arinell’s in Berkeley, thin, with sauce and cheese in balance:
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This is generally true, although IME it depends on the place. The crust on NY Style pizza can vary in thickness from nearly as thin as a Neapolitan to nearly as thick as an “American” style pizza (think of the standard offering from chains like Domino’s, Papa John’s, etc.). For me, somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot, but I know many people prefer thinner versions. Anyway, the thicker the crust, the better it can hold up to toppings, so you will usually find more sauce and cheese on thicker crusts than thinner ones. Really, NY Style is all about balance.
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The only style of pizza that is really not doable in most home ovens is a Neapolitan, which really requires temps of 800+ Fahrenheit. NY style typically cooks at 550-600, which is a little hotter than most home ovens can do, but you can get close enough to turn out a really great NY Style pie at home, especially if you have a good pizza steel (stones work too, though not as well). If you want a really cheesy NY Style pizza, use a good NY style dough recipe and stretch it a little thicker than average - that will allow you to add more cheese without overwhelming the crust’s structure.
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I really like reading all these posts . Ill have to make pizza again . My first one i ever made turned out great . The second one not as good .
I am going to be the first to vote .
Have the pizza topic all the time . Not ending in March.
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Editing above, since the GF daughter is still home I used 2 Tbs of the King Arthur gluten free 1-for-1 flour, and (surprisingly to me) it ended up a bit too thick so I had to add liquid to thin it down some.
I made another NY style pizza for dinner tonight, this time with sautéed mushrooms. I also launched without parchment this time, the leoparding on the bottom looks a little better (maybe)
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WOW!! That is one pretty pizza!!
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I tend to agree with you. Pineapple doesn’t stand well on its own on a pizza
Hmmm… one of my fav pizzas is BBQ sauce, moz, BBQ chicken, bacon, red onion, and pineapple.
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And used KA’s GF specific “pizza dough” flour for her crust (foreground next 2 photos):
I was getting ready to rotate and switch hers to the upper stone (usually hotter) but she said it looked done enough for her and didn’t care if the edges got the leopard spots. It got a pretty nice rise on the edges again (for GF pizza crust), mainly about an inch tall with a couple of spots 1.5-2 inches. I used 75% of the recipe that would have made 2x10 inch crusts in order to make a single at 12 inches.
Both pies were just white sauce, sautéed white mushrooms and caramelized onions.
The regular wheat flour crust was a cheat pre-made from the deli. I don’t like it as much as my own types, but it’s good in a pinch. I’d been planning to make both pies as GF but then kind of at the last minute, remembered how much that danged GF flour costs and made a quick store run.
This edge crust is not quite as poofy as it appears in the photo because I rolled some mozz pieces into it for a stuffed edge.
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