Ohio Valley style - DiCarlo's Pizza recipe

Ohio Valley style - DiCarlo's Pizza recipe:

Dough

Bread flour 1# (get your kitchen scale and weigh it) (454 g)

Water 1.25c (295 g)

Active dry yeast 1/4 tsp

Salt 2 tsp

Sugar 3/4 TBSP

My first attempt I will use warm water with the sugar and a little flour in it for a slurry, add the yeast, then let it bubble up over 1/2 hour of so.  Then add this to the remaining ingredients and combine until it forms what I hope to be a nice dough ball.  Then I will put it in the fridge to slow rise for a day or two until I decide to make the pizza.  That day I will take it out and let it come to room temp before stretching to the dimensions of the pan.

Sauce

96 oz crushed tomatoes w basil

2 cloves garlic

1/2c finely diced onion

1/2c finely diced green bell pepper

1/4c EVOO

This is a bit different proportion wise from the one on the pizzamaking.com site, but I wanted a little more robust sauce.  What Italian uses 2 garlic cloves in a sauce made from 450oz sauce?  None I know of. 

So, I sweated the garlic, peppers and onions in olive oil for 10min or so until the onions were translucent, then added the tomatoes, brought it up to temp then simmered on low for 4 hours.  I plan to can what extra I have (10# pressure for 20 min). 

Cheese

Krogers sells a generic "Pizza Cheese that is probably 75% mozzarella and 25% provolone and romano.  This is actually a pretty good cheese.  To get that weird granular quality rather than the long strings of cheese I froze the 32oz (2#) of the cheese and then put it in the cuisinart food processor and pulsed it until I got the consistency I was looking for. Then I let the cheese come to room temperature.

Pepperoni

Went with Hormel.  Use whatever one you like best.

Baking

Here's where there is a departure between what I had ever done before and what I leaned at pizzamaking.com.

Put your large rectangular baking stone into the oven and preheat to 525 degrees.  Yep.  You heard that right.  For 1 hour prior to baking!  This gets the stone super hot and ready to crisp the bottom of the pizza.  1 used an 11x17 well broken in aluminum baking pan that I bought some time ago at Sam's Club in their industrial food section.  I rubbed it down with a paper towel soaked with olive oil then stretched the dough to fit the pan.  You could roll it out then slide it into the pan as well.  I made sure the crust edge went up the side of the pan and went flush with the top of edge of the baking sheet.  Then I spread the sauce out onto the dough.  Slide the baking sheet onto the baking stone.  I have it in the upper third of the oven.  You may want it higher or lower.  I found 20min browned the crust edges and got the sauce pretty hot.  Remmeber I am living at 2000ft so if your altitude is different you will need to adjust your baking time.  Take the pizza out of the oven and spread your granular cheese over top of it.  Then spread out your pepperoni.  I thought I might have to cover it to get that melty cheese thing going but as it turns out that was unnecessary - I turned out just fine on its own.

The result?  It's not perfect yet.  The sauce ended up maybe a little too robust, but for me that was fine.  One could easily adjust down some of the ingredients.  I like a little garlic salt on mine afterward.  Please try the recipe and let me know what you think.  I am just starting out here so any and all help and adjustments to the recipe are welcome.

THE PANS

If you want to locate those 16 x 16 pans, they can be procured from
The Twin Team
Twin Supply Inc
866-630-4747
www.twinsupply.com

Ask for 16 x 16 x1 Tapered design BLACK steel, reinforced heavy gauge steel wire.
$32.00 per pan, plus shipping and handling
This item is not on their web site, please call and order on the phone"



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