Week 19: New York Style Pizza with Four Cheeses

Since I have already made a deep dish Chicago pizza, I decided to try making the other pizza in America – NY style.  I don’t pretend to know anything about New York Pizza.  I have only been there for two very brief trips, and while I did eat my fair share of pizza, it was a few years ago and I didn’t really pay that much attention to the details.

I read many different crust recipes before deciding on one from Serious Eats.  I also made the accompanying pizza sauce.

I followed the instructions, which went by weight instead of volume, and I ended up with a very sticky dough.  I had to add a bit more flour when kneading it, but it was still pretty sticky.  I went with it though – I figured maybe this dough is supposed to be this way.  The recipe says to let the pizza rise in the fridge for 1-5 days.  I only did mine for one day.

Since this is supposed to be a NY style pizza, that meant that we needed big, floppy slices.  My husband ran across a blog post from Serious Eats a couple weeks ago, showing how to cut a pizza to make big, NY style pizza slices.  I decided to try this out this week and did my best at making an oblong pizza.

For my four cheeses I chose mozzarella, Monterey Jack, Swiss, and Parmesan, simply because I had all those cheeses already.

After topping the pizza with the sauce and cheeses, I cooked it at 500 F for about 12 minutes.  Because the dough was so sticky, I had problems with it sticking to my peel, even though I put down a generous amount of cornmeal beforehand, like usual.  We had a small mishap sliding it to the pizza stone.  We did the best we could to save it, but one side ended up a bit deformed.

This pizza was pretty good.  The crust was nice and thin and somewhat crispy.  I was a little disappointed that the pizza slices weren’t as floppy as normal New York pizza – I couldn’t fold my slice in half.  Overall though, it was a good pizza.  The cheeses came together nicely and no one cheese overpowered the others.  The husband really liked the crust and asked for it to go into the regular rotation.  I will definitely be making it again.  The sauce was pretty good too.  The husband thought it was a little sweet, but I liked it.  I’ll probably make it again too, especially since I’ve been looking for a homemade sauce to use.