Za

I discovered after I had dough rising that I had no sauce. I'm not nuts about red sauce on pizza, though I usually have a small jar of Prego around that I can fall back on. Even more usually, it seems like I usually have a couple jars of alfredo sauce about. It's one of those things I seem to buy just in case and always turn out to have a jar in the pantry when I get home from the store.

And then there's pesto. It's pretty typical for me to have one or two types of it on hand. But on the pasta/pizza sauce front, the cupboards were bare. So I settled for brushing the crusts with olive oil.



I made too much dough for the first pie, the prosciutto/black olive. I'd measured clumsily and had to add water to get the consistency right, the result being something like 20% more dough on a recipe that's meant to give big, pillowy handles around the edge.

So I rolled it out larger then the pan and rolled it in around cheese for a stuffed crust. Or, as Em describes it (parroting a Veggie Tales line from years ago), Cheese in the crust, that's tremendous!



And if Em missed the sauce on her pizza, she didn't say so. She, in fact, ate an enormous piece of this stuff crust and all, which is unusual. She heated a leftover piece this morning for breakfast and did likewise.



For the second pie I made a wheat crust, browned some hot Cosentino's Italian sausage and sweated a bunch of pepperoni. The sweating is key to keeping the end result from being obnoxiously greasy: I microwave the pepperoni slices for several minutes between paper towels until they quit soaking the paper towels with red grease. This leaves the flavor and removes the bulk of the fat. It also lets the pepperoni get nice and crispy on top of the pizza without overcooking the pie.