Buffalo Style Pizza - Party Pizza - Food Wishes

[Music] hello this is chef john from foodwishes.com with buffalo style pizza that's right i will eventually explain what makes a pizza buffalo style but before i start doing that let me tell you what doesn't make it a buffalo style pizza and that would be frank's hot sauce or chicken or blue cheese or celery okay this is simply the style of pizza that they apparently enjoy in buffalo new york and i say apparently because i don't think i've ever actually had it but i've heard great things and i've always wanted to try it and thanks to many many minutes of extensive research i think i got it pretty close so with that let's go ahead and get started by making our buffalo style pizza sauce which we'll begin by placing a saucepan over medium-high heat into which we'll drizzle a little bit of olive oil followed by one can of tomato paste okay the first characteristic of buffalo style pizza is apparently the sauce is made out of tomato paste and not fresh tomatoes or canned plum tomatoes like most pizza sauces and then to that we're supposed to add some garlic powder as well as some onion powder and yes maybe fresh garlic and fresh onion would taste better but we don't want it to taste better we want it to taste like pizza in buffalo new york and then after that we will add some red pepper flakes as well as some dried basil and some dried oregano and then we'll also go ahead and toss in some salt as well as the second most important ingredient next to the paste and that would be a couple spoons of sugar since from all accounts a buffalo style pizza sauce has to be sweet or at least sweeter than your typical pizza sauce and then what we'll do once everything's in there is go ahead and toast this tomato paste and other ingredients in that olive oil for a few minutes until the sort of starts to caramelize onto the bottom of the pan creating what nobody in buffalo calls a fond and once we have sauteed our tomato paste mixture for a few minutes and it hopefully looks a little something like this we will stir in a couple cups of cold fresh water and we will patiently wait for this to come up to a simmer and no a silicone spoonula does not do a great job of stirring tomato paste into water so as it started simmering i went ahead and switched to a whisk and i made sure my mixture was nice and smooth and once our sauce is simmering what we'll do is back the heat down to medium and we will reduce that down until it thickens up all right not super thick all right most of the great pizzas i've seen made in my life have been done using a relatively thin sauce since don't forget that stuff's got to cook in a hot oven and it's going to reduce and thicken as it bakes so for me this thickness right here is just about perfect i know despite the name you are not allowed to put any frank's hot sauce in there well actually i'm mostly kidding since you can put in whatever you want i mean you are after all the jim kelly of what goes in your belly but again this has absolutely nothing to do with buffalo style chicken wings and that's it other than maybe checking for seasoning our buffalo style pizza sauce is done and we can simply turn off the heat and let it cool down before we use it and once that's set we can move on to panning up our dough which we will be pressing out and stretching to fill this very well olive oiled standard half sheet pan and besides the pan we'll want to make sure we keep our fingers oiled as well and as luck would have it exactly one batch of our detroit pizza dough will fit one of these sheet pans perfectly speaking of sheet pans make sure you use a heavy duty professional one right one of those thin flimsy cookie sheets is not going to work very well here and then let me give you a huge tip for stretching this dough because this dough is fairly elastic you're only going to be able to push and stretch it out to a certain size before it just starts pulling back it won't go any further so what we'll do once that happens is simply stop and let the dough rest and relax for five minutes at which point we can resume the stretching the pulling and the pushing and it's been my experience that like two restings is enough but you'll know because the dough will let you know and besides the fact that this detroit pizza dough works out perfectly size wise and will give us the exact thickness that we want which by the way for a buffalo style pizza is not thin or thick it's like somewhere in the middle but the other reason this works so well is because buffalo style pizza crust is supposed to be fairly light and airy and actually some people even refer to it as focaccia-like which happily are pretty much the same characteristics of a detroit pizza crust but no matter what pizza dough you're using we do eventually want to stretch it into the corners and again that was made possible by letting this rest twice and that's it once our dough has been put in the pan like a real buffalo bills fan we'll go ahead and spread over our now cooled sauce although you can maybe see by the steam coming off it i didn't exactly let mine cool down all the way but do as i say and not as i did and besides not putting too too much on and getting it spread nice and evenly another characteristic of buffalo pizza is that the sauce goes all the way to the edge of the crust there will not shell knot cannot be any naked crust according to my sources at least embedded deep inside the buffalo pizza subculture and other than that huge bare spot i just made that is looking pretty good and then once that's set we can go ahead and apply our cheese in the way of way too much mozzarella all right another signature characteristic is a lot of cheese so believe it or not for a half sheet pan we're actually going to scatter over a pound of mozzarella oh and make sure you're using that very firm low moisture variety and not that wet fresh stuff and in the spirit of full disclosure the hunk of mozzarella i was working with was 14 ounces so i didn't quite use the full amount called for so let's just say we're going to put down between 14 and 16 ounces of cheese and again just like the sauce we want to go all the way to the edge and then once our pizza has been cheesed we will go ahead and place down our pepperoni which is hopefully not this large thin kind i have to use okay maybe the most iconic characteristic of this pizza is what they call cup and char pepperoni which means as it bakes in the hot oven the slices kind of curl up and form a cup and then the top edges get nicely charred in black which only happens if you use a thickly sliced smaller round of pepperoni which for some reason they do not sell in california or at least i can't find it so if you can get the thicker smaller stuff please use it and you will get a much more authentic look although having said that i did get partial cupping and charring which was nice and as you can see we're going for almost but not quite full coverage and then one last trick before this goes in the oven what i like to do is very carefully place this over a high flame and sort of move it around all over so that bottom crust gets a little head start since one of the problems cooking a giant pizza on one of these sheet pans is that sometimes that crust underneath gets undercooked all right there's nothing sadder than an undercooked under brown crust i mean not like lose four straight super bowls sad but still pretty sad so i like to give that about a minute over the flame until i can hear that olive oil starting to sizzle at which point it's now ready to transfer into the lower center of a 500 degree oven for about 20 to 25 minutes or until our cheese is beautifully browned and hopefully our pepperoni have cupped and charred which i did have happen on a couple of these slices and yes i did cook this to what we call in the pizza business well done which was mostly to try to get that pepperoni to char but also i really do like nicely caramelized cheese so i went ahead and transferred that onto a cutting board and then went ahead and sliced it up with my pizza wheel and if you want that to be a little trickier make sure you use an odd number of rows and columns of pepperoni all right mine was seven by five which means we have to cut through pepperoni instead of cutting between pepperoni which is always easier and looks nicer but anyway as mildly annoying as that was i quickly moved on to the part where i get to take a bite and yes thanks to our nice hot oven and that putting it over the flame trick our bottom is beautifully cooked and that my friends truly was a great piece of pizza okay we have that light airy tender almost focaccia like crust topped with that somewhat sweet but because we used paste intensely tomato flavored sauce and then what looked like a ton of mozzarella ended up being the perfect amount with everything being topped off with that beautifully caramelized pepperoni and of course now i'm tempted to get some of that proper buffalo pepperoni mail ordered so i can taste how big of a difference that really makes but anyway that's it my first and probably not last attempt at buffalo style pizza what this lacks in frank's hot sauce and chicken and blue cheese and celery it more than makes up for by being a really great pepperoni pizza and i might add since it doesn't include those things it is perfect to serve alongside buffalo style chicken wings you know like at a super bowl party or something similar but no matter what you serve it with i really do hope you give this a try soon so please follow the links below for the ingredient amounts a printable written recipe and much more info as usual and as always enjoy you

Channel: Food Wishes

Views: 346,272

Keywords: Buffalo, Pizza, sheet, party, cup, char, pepperoni, Italian, recipe, pasta, sauce, chef, john, food, wishes, cooking

Id: 0pnsU0-kGDA

Length: 8min 56sec (536 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2021