Stuffed crust pizza, from Lauren Morrill's 'It's Kind of a Cheesy Love Story'

sure stuffed crust pizza is exactly what it sounds like you just tuck a ring of cheese into the dough around the edge but there's a lot that can go wrong leaks of various kinds i think i've worked out a pretty reliable method here dough is my normal recipe in the description i am making it via the well method today for no particular reason and for stuffed crust i think it helps to knead in a little extra flour it should be sticky but just a little sticky like that a drier dough like that will be stronger less likely to tear and leak and where i would normally divide this much dough into four pizzas i'm doing three you need a little extra dough per pizza to wrap that ring and i'm not putting any olive oil in the bowl where i will rise this i find oil on the dough ball surface can make it harder to get a good seal around the cheese let those rise to make stuffed crust we need string cheese my brand is back i love this kind string cheese has been worked so that its proteins line up in these long parallel threads and it comes out of the machines in these big long coils certainly a lot of the pros use the whole unbroken coil for stuffed crusts but we can just line these pieces up end to end these are too thick for me for a home oven sized pizza so i'm cutting them in half you can leave them whole maybe you can handle that much dairy i'll chill these and i'm thrilled to use string cheese for the top of my pizza too the whole milk low moisture version of this brand is my favorite pizza cheese galbani sells a block version but is not the same as the string version i think this is better it's dryer it's sharper yes i cut it into weird pellets chill those my sauce is just this brand of crushed tomatoes with some olive oil dried herbs pinch of sugar now check this a pizza screen it only costs a few bucks 14 inch diameter like this is a good maximum size for a home oven i would either plan to bake on one of these or on parchment paper you will see why here's my dough after two days of cold rise in the fridge you could do two hours on the counter instead but i think this tastes better and it'll be easier to work with cold right on the counter i am rolling this out no flour dusting i want it to stick to the counter the sticking will keep it from snapping back like a rubber band i'm trying to get it pretty evenly round and a little wider than my screen is not quite there yet push down hard from the middle then push out hand stretching would not get the outer ring thin enough for stuffed crust there we go i'm gonna peel that off the counter if the dough wasn't cold it'll be more likely to tear right here now on top of the screen this goes and i'll try to position it as evenly over the screen as possible we need a lot of very thin excess dough around the edge to fold over and seal the cheese so i'm just rolling out the skirts that's hanging over the edge there again i want it to stick the counter is keeping it stretched out for me it's important you have a lot of excess all the way around i've got a short bit there so i'm tearing excess from elsewhere and grafting it on there you go looks like we flayed somebody alive time for our cheese ring around and around and around we go three four and wet with water and wet with water now fold and crimp and fold and crimp if you don't have a ton of excess folded back onto the interior of the pizza like this the cheese ring is very likely to leak into the center having a lot of excess also means that you don't have to stretch the dough so tight over the cheese that it might tear and then leak through the outer side or the bottom over here i've got some butter in a pan and i'm gonna put in some herbs and spices and enough salt to make it sandy in there since this pizza will have a lot of untopped crust we might as well make that surface taste better top and sides all over and now that everything is greasy and your fingertips won't stick to the dough you can go back and press hard to seal the cheese ring in there it's taken us a long time to prepare this pizza and if it was just sitting on a wooden or metal peel right now it would be hopelessly stuck by the time we tried to shimmy it into the oven this is why for stuffed crust i think it makes a lot of sense to bake on a screen or directly on parchment paper sauce is on parmesan from the can sorry that's just the taste of pizza to me use what you want now here's my weird mozzarella pellets you don't have to do this the reason i'm doing it is my new oven has proved to be kind of disappointing for pizza making it just doesn't get hot enough by the time my crust is brown my cheese has overheated and squeezed out buckets of orange grease by putting chilled cheese on in huge chunks i am significantly slowing the melting process my oven's on full blast and i preheated my baking steel for an hour without a steel or a stone the bottom would not brown i also find i need to switch to the broiler halfway through with this oven that's the top element but you know every oven is different this oven also just doesn't seem to get much heat onto the sides of things on any setting but that still looks pretty darn good oh hey it's my lovely wife lauren what's she got there now when a certain well-known restaurant chain does stuffed crust pizza they are using a special blend design to hold its shape when heated this cheese is going to flatten and give off steam that makes a hollow dome above it but i don't think that's a bad thing that cavity makes for kind of a croissant-like texture as you bite down through it the pizza screen has given the bottom a golden finish that reminds me of airport pizza screens are popular in food service but i kind of dig that for stuffed crust feels appropriate somehow cheers and hey if you like pizza consider buying lauren's latest why a novel it's kind of a cheesy love story in bookstores everywhere as of today should i do an adam ragia i suppose this is not officially a sponsorship that i need to disclose but you know we're married so we share the money well here i'll go like this the idea came from a viral story about a woman who gave birth in a chick-fil-a um the book is about a girl who was born on the bathroom floor of a locally owned pizza parlor called hot and crusty pizza um she is gifted free pizza for life and a guaranteed job when she turned 16 and we open on her 16th birthday when she's about to start the job and she really does not want to well it was a long gestation because i started writing this in fall of 2018. noon just before adam went viral for pizza yes you will think that she is exploiting all of this here okay but he exploited me indeed yes although actually the fact that i was making pizza obsessively before the youtube thing happened is that why you were thinking of pizza when you wrote a book probably i mean i'm sure it's it's all connected so the reason we're making stuffed crust pizza is because it is sort of a long-running joke in the book that at this pizza place at the end of every shift they keep finding stuffed crust pizza in the restaurant but they don't make stuffed crust pizza at hot and crusty so they're trying always trying to figure out who is bringing in pizza from another pizza place so the book is out today you can buy it wherever books are sold if you look in the link in the bottom situation you can get a signed copy if you order from little shop of stories in decatur georgia i will be signing books there on saturday march 13th so if you order by then your copy will arrive signed and there's a link down below for that buy my book please don't use that you got it honey i'm proud of you

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,914,811

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Id: 9AG8A40BzXw

Length: 6min 47sec (407 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021