Why I Oughta...

I'm not *exactly* sure how I recently came across this new (to me) pizza style, but it sure has my attention.  What style is that?  I suppose the widest birth name-wise I can give it is: Sfincione.  It is a version (most often) of something similar to a Sicilian or Grandma pizza.  Tweaked.  Kenji @ Serious Eats has done his thing with it and calls it "New Years Pizza" .  It is characterized by a light, hole-filled dough that is crisp/fried on the bottom.  Sauce on top.  And...finished with the crunch of breadcrumbs.  That recipe is, however, NOT where I started on this pizza journey rabbit hole.  Nope.  It was earlier this year when I read that a pizza pop-up from Nashville (of all places) was coming to town to participate in a Chicago pizza festival.  That place is St. Vito Focacceria.   Well...that's interesting, I thought.   I didn't attend said fest. But, I've been sitting on this Instagram po...

At the beginning of COVID and the start of social distancing/stay-at-home, I saw some unique pizza pans from Lloyd's pans on Instagram and was 'influenced' (swipe up) to buy them .  These new pans are long and skinny and hold a lot of promise for me as a home pizza maker. I've been fine-tuning my formulations on these pans over the past 60 days and have had some success.  Still plenty of work to do - as the last time I used these I had a TERRIBLE flop - but I'm seeing some good results like these below: I've recently started to use some of our sourdough starter in the formulation.  I've consistently used a 1.5 cup of flour as the basis for the chassis.  I've historically used ADY, but over the past few weeks, I've been using three 'scoops' of our starter and just a little bit of ADY - which...we're running low on.  When I use the starter in bread doughs, I go the whole starter --> poolish --> dough.  But, in these p...

A few weeks back, I saw in Adam Kuban's Instagram Stories (he's the "OG pizza blogger" that I've posted about from time-to-time ) that he had purchased some new pans from Lloyd's Pans that included a long/thin pan that had a pretty unique shape.  I think...he then included a 'repost' (is that what we call them on Instagram?) of a story from TheKitchenWhisperer.Pizza where she was talking about how she was using similar pans.  Here's one of her posts .  And if you look at her feed, there are a bunch .  This one appears to be when she first acquired the pans .    Here's one of a full topped pie below: View this post on Instagram 🎵 “I’m feelin’ Hot! Hot! Hot!” This pizza was SPICY 🔥 in all the best ways! ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ I couldn’t let another day go by without using my 18” Long Pan from @lloydpans . A girl’s gotta eat after all! ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ Layers of 🔥🌶spicy banana pepper sauce, cheese blend, ...

For the past few years, I've been toying (well...a little bit more than toying!) around with a Detroit-style dough formulation that was based solely on this formulation from PizzaHog on the PizzaMaking.com forums .  But, the dough was never quite 'enough' to fill the pans to all four corners. So, over the past few months, I've taken to the baker's percentage calculator (Thx, NYU!) to 'up' the size of the total dough ball in volume, but keep the percentages equal.  So, I've take the flour up from 273 grams to 300 grams and the calculator factor'd the rest.  With the extra 25 grams, the skin flows out to the corners and fills up the pan all the way. The past few times I've made pizza at home, I've had to turn to the calculator each time I wanted to make pizza.  Now, I'm planting this here on the blog, so I can turn to it when necessary.

I make about 4 trips to Trader Joe's every year.  About once a quarter, I'll head there with Nat and the girls on one of their bi-weekly trips.  Sometime last year, I found this sauce on one of the end caps.  I grabbed a bottle and fell in love.  Now, my experience with Trader Joe's is that they don't keep products on their shelves very long if they don't sell well, so I was concerned that when we went back a week or two later, it would be gone. But, much to my surprise, we've been able to buy the stuff at regular intervals over the last six months.  I've been using it on a Detroit-style BBQ Chicken Pizza that I've been making and - for my money - the sauce is the boss.  I have 2 bottles sitting on the shelf in the pantry and I've just added it to the list for our next trip to TJs. I better stock up in case the fine folks at Trader Joe's change their mind and stop carrying the stuff.

Here's my latest pre-baked Detroit-style pizza pie.  You'll note the seasoned blue steel pizza pan and the 'signature' diagonal lines of sauce.  Although this pic may not make your mouth water , jt turned out pretty great, aside from the 2 spots that stuck to the bottom of the new pans.  They just need a big more seasoning, I guess.  Off to the kitchen laboratory!