Kids #2, #4 made it home yesterday afternoon, and the crust & pies turned out nicely. I used about 1.4x of Charlie’s recipe because he says it makes 2, 10-inch rounds and I wanted them to be 12 inch.
Dressed and ready for the oven:
At top is pepperoni, sautéed mushroom, caramelized onions. The bottom pie is fine slices of sun dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, and (1/2) quartered green olives (this daughter doesn’t dig olives, green or black). Both pies are dual-layered, under and over the cheeses. I do tend to over-load, which is kind of a crime on these crusts.
Life lesson: Don’t use blue cheese stuffed olives if you don’t want blue cheese flavor. They were all I had on hand and I thought simply removing the blue cheese-like substance would have done with it. But it didn’t - the flavor permeated the olives.
On both pies the cheese shreds were about half-and-half whole milk mozzarella and fontina (I had forgotten that I’d used half the mozz brick recently and didn’t have enough). Then torn chunks of fresh mozz and a few tablespoons of fine parm shreds.
Here they are as-baked:
And a side-view, because top-down is kind of hard to see the edge crust. It was 1.5-2.5 inches tall, all around on both pies. Once we’d eat a piece down toward the edge, we’d pull it open, book style, and butter it.
If you make pizza at home and haven’t tried Charlie’s recipe (linked in my quote portion above), give it a shot. You do have to plan ahead, because the preferment/biga needs 12-24 hours. The preferment is all the flour, a bit of yeast, and most of the water. There are 3 separate rest/proof periods and you’ll need 3-3.5 hours from the time you do the first kneading (adding in remainder ingredients) until you’re ready to start forming the pies.
ETA - the recipe is linked above, but I also found it useful to watch him do it on this YT vid. I don’t knead by hand, though - I just knead it enough to get the remaining ingredients incorporated, then let the stand mixer do the work.
