pizza no. 8 : pepperoni deep dish.
occasion : it's Sunday and we've been talking about building a deep dish pizza for weeks.
crust : our whole wheat usual. The first time we made this, shown above, I didn't cut down the recipe enough. We have since tried again and this time and I cut the recipe by about a third and an extra tbsp of olive oil. It was much better, but I bet I could still start with less dough. I just made it, let it rise like normal, rolled it out and then tucked it into a 9inch pie pan. This deep dish pizza we baked for 25-30 minutes at 400*.
sauce : a tomato sauce very similar to the one shown here from Emeril.
cheese : mozzarella & provolone.
toppings : black olives, pepperoni and fresh basil.
notes part one : we build this upside down – cheese on the bottom, toppings in the middle and tomato sauce on top because the recipes Paul found online recommended that.
notes part two : Last time I shared a pizza recipe it was brought to my attention that I don't tell you how long to bake the pizzas. You're right, I don't usually share cooking details and temps for each pizza, but the cooking instructions outlined in our dough recipe (linked above!) recommend baking at 425* for 25 minutes. That was when we had an electric oven. Now we are on gas and bake normal crust at 500* for closer to 15 minutes. I hate to say it, but baking pizza involves a bit of trial and error at first and depends a lot on your oven. Pay attention to those first few pies. You want the cheese to be completely melted and the crust to be brown and hard to the touch.
thoughts : this was a good first attempt at deep dish. We learned a lot (like to cut the dough down) and cook our tomato sauce for longer so more of the water boils off (it was bit too liquidy). But the taste was fantastic.
enJOY it 
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