I’ve mentioned Ken Forkish’s Flour Water Salt Yeast before, which is for making breads. A companion book to it is Forkish’s The Elements of Pizza: Unlocking the Secrets to World-Class Pies at Home. It has lots of great recipes for dough, sauce, and the overall pizza. Making the New York Cheese Pizza was my personal project for this week.

Preparation

We prepare our normal pizzas within the span of about 15 minutes: dough, sauce, toppings, the whole shebang. With the New York Cheese Pizza recipe, you prepare the dough two to three days ahead of time. The dough yields three dough balls, so you can make three different pizzas (or get three chances to do one right 🙂 ).

Here’s what the dough balls look like fresh from their second fermentation in the refrigerator:

The sauce can also be made ahead of time. You can get most of it done in the blender with prepared ingredients, and then there’s a bit of cooking with some sugar. Here’s what it looks like in the blender:

Assembling the Pizzas

While I haven’t yet mastered the art of the pizza toss, The Elements of Pizza does have some good guidance on shaping the dough balls to get them stretched out to pizza size. Having done that, and added the sauce on top, you get to add the cheese. The book suggests either grana padano or pecorino romano, both then covered with mozzarella, but we couldn’t settle on one–so we did both options.

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Because there were three dough balls, we tried three different bases to cook them on: The baking stone, a baking sheet, and in a skillet.

Cooking and Eating

We deviated from the book here as our baking stone is a little temperature sensitive, and only set the oven to 450 degrees F. The skillet pizza was cooked low and slow to avoid burning it.

You can see below how the pizzas came out after cooking. You’ll note that there are now toppings on the stone-baked and sheet-baked pizzas, and that’s because these pictures were from the second, more-toppings round of pizzas–as I was an idiot and didn’t take “after” pictures on the first round. Yes, this also makes these not strictly cheese pizzas. You know what, though? We all like pepperoni, so it’s darned well going on there.

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While they might all look a little greasy, that’s from the camera angle and light reflection that I used. You can see that the baking stone and sheet pizzas came out nice and browned. The skillet pizza–well, I’m still working on that. The toppings are definitely less cooked than I would like.

The family verdict? If a picture is worth a thousand words, well then, here is the answer.

The baking stone and sheet pizzas were easily the favorites. The skillet pizza tasted fine, but its “doneness” could use improvement.

These pizzas were delicious, and there are many more recipes in Forkish’s book. We’ll certainly do more in the future, along with other projects.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this project. Have a wonderful week!

Author’s Note: This post was supposed to come out earlier. Kids, however, are great at taking their sickness, mutating it to maximum potential, and giving it to you. Life is better now so we’re back on track. Apologies for the delay!