Pizza 1.1

(continued from Pizza 1.0)

To recap, Pizza 1.0 was an attempt to create a pizza that contained everything I ever wanted from a pizza:

• home-made base
• herbs in the dough
• thin base
• cheese-stuffed crust
• toppings all the way to the edge (or in this case, right up to the cheese-stuffed crust part)

Of those points, the cheese-stuffed crust one was going to be the challenge since I had never attempted it before creating Pizza 1.0. In my first attempt, while the rest of the pizza was absolutely delicious, the cheesy crust was very weak: I used the wrong cheese or not enough of it.

With Pizza 1.1, I aimed to improve on the cheesy crust aspect of it, which was to use the correct cheese. After several discussions about it with amazing-baking girl, I settled on mozzarella cheese (other options being pre-made cheese sticks/string) and went out to buy some.

I also planned the afternoon that I'd be making Pizza 1.1 so that I could invite others to eat the pizza with me. I asked what toppings people would like, and the list that came back pretty-much amounted to an apricot chicken pizza, so I went with that.

There was one surprise that came out of making the pizza, and that was the use of canned apricots when in the oven caused the juices to ooze out all over the pizza, adding a subtle and lovely apricot taste to the base.

As for the cheesy crust, it was MUCH better than last time: the mozzarella didn't thin out when cooked so stayed thick enough in the crust for it to be actually tasted. When I tested it while it cooked by cutting into a section of the crust, it gushed out of the resulting hole just like it does in the ads. Mmmmm...

There is still room for improvement though: the bread of the crust itself was a bit too thick in places, weakening the overall cheese taste. That's a side-effect of the way I roll-out the dough however, so for Pizza 1.2 I'll have to figure-out a way to keep the edges thin.