I Live the Dream

I have this pizza thing totally figured out.

Today I made a pie, and I made adjustments to make sure the crust was cooked correctly. It worked great, although I didn’t time it quite right.

Here’s what I made. First the whole pie.

Now the crust. Those indentations are from my fingers. I made them intentionally.

I made the sauce with a 50/50 mix of Stanislaus Saporito and Cento San Marzano tomatoes (no puree included), and it was excellent, but truthfully, I think either product is better alone than with the other. You gain some of each product’s strengths, but you also lose some.

As for the crust, I rotated the pan once while it was cooking on the bottom rack. I had a hot stone on an upper rack. After nine minutes, I moved the stone to the lower rack (turned out to be unnecessary) and put the pie on it. I left the pie there for two minutes and yanked it. The crust was crisper than a crust finished in the pan, and it was darker.

Oddly, pizza crust always looks more done in photos than it is in real life. This crust was just barely darker than I would have liked; I should have pulled it after one minute on the stone. But it wasn’t brown, the way it looks in the pictures.

You don’t really need a pan with steep sides to do this. The edges that rested against the pan are good, but the edge that stood on its own was also good, in a different way.

If you do this, make sure the stone is hot before you put the pie in the oven.

The reason I moved the stone to the lower rack is that I was afraid it would cool when the pizza hit it, and I wanted it over the heat. But the stone held more than enough heat to get the job done.

By the grace of the good Lord, I have utterly defeated Sicilian pizza. Now I have to find something to do with the rest of my life.