A Pizza "A Ha! Moment" - Aurelio's Confirms Cheeses

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As the weather turns cooler and Fall arrives, my mind begins to turn towards pizza making at home.  For the past few years, I've been steadily improving and tweaking my Detroit-style pies, but it feels like I'm near the end of the line in terms of changes and modifications.  Between the well-seasoned pan, the tweaked dough formulation, and the cheese combo's, I've begun to deliver a consistent product that is repeat-able as long as I have the time to do a cold rise overnight.

So, that means I can start to turn my pizza-attention to a different kind of pie.  And I'm thinking that is going to be to try to craft a true south-side tavern-style thin crust pie.  And my favorite pizza is one of those:  Aurelio's.  If you buy into the Pizza Cognition Theory, I'm into Aurelio's because...to me, it *is* pizza.  It is what I had in Frankfort growing up.  Win a baseball game?  Let's go to Aurelio's in Downtown Frankfort.  After the awkward 7th grade dance on a Friday night at the Park District?  Let's walk down to Aurelio's and eat pizza and act like Tweens. It was my pizza place.  And it has become my pizza place as an adult.  I've been to the Homewood location, but we mostly dine at the LaGrange franchise.  The girls love the Dum-dums.  No idea if they like the pizza.  Because they usually act like savages when we take their 'lolli's' away from them before we eat.  

Anyway...because I've been poking around the pizza-making forums, trying to get my arms around an Aurelio's clone, I came across this video from Geneva, Illinois public access television.  If you go ahead to the 16:15 mark, you'll see the guy who runs the Aurelio's there discuss ingredients...including the cheeses they use. 

"Two mozzarella cheeses that we blend together."
"There's been times when people think that we add a little cheddar cheese to it...but I'm going on the record...there's no cheddar cheese."
Interesting.  Turns out, the orange-ish tint comes from the paprika out of the sausage and pepperoni.  
Noted.
Also...he points out that they roll/sheet their skins out ahead of time and let them kind of dry out.   They don't want the top 'sticky'.  Not 'doughy'.  
Noted as well.  
Who's up for a little pizza party experiment/lab session?

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