i’m makin a pizza and shit got real. real pepperoni. i dedicated my evening to giving painful, romantical birth to three giant logs of pepperoni. triplets. they say parents can’t choose a favorite, but if i had to pick from pepperoni 1, pepperoni 2, pepperoni 3, and basil, i certainly wouldn’t pick basil.
so, in truth, this isn’t going to be 100% legit pepperoni. it’s not going to be dry cured; instead i am going to smoke it (minus the smoke) since i have neither the time nor the resources for dry curing. so it’s kind of up in the air how this stuff is going to turn out. but i feel pretty good about phase one of the production. tonight i did the grinding and stuffing, leaving the cooking to either tomorrow or saturday.
my prep involved cutting up meats, grinding some spices, drinking some wine, and being at the ready with my trusty anus extract.
beef & pork & pork back fat go into this one, at a finer grind than i have been doing with my other sausages.
this is the gross puke slime paste i wound up with after grinding all night long. mixing in the spices, a bit of wine, and the cure give it a nice reddish brown color. the red would come out even more if i were going down the dry cure route, but i’m pretty happy with how it was looking even at this point in the process.
annnnd after stuffing into their natural casings, we have our babies. long bastards. the stuffing process was shitty. lots of air in the line because the meat was like a thick paste. but a little sensual manipulation and everything was packed as tightly as i had hoped.
hard to say how it will turn out. even though i had some left over after the stuffing process, i didn’t cook it to give it a try. it wouldn’t taste the same, and it’s far too late to make any changes at this point anyway. i am mostly interested in how the pepperoni “behaves” once sliced and cooked on the pizza without having undergone the dry curing. we’ll see how close this comes to real pepperoni. i plan on picking up some sliced pepperoni at the store beforehand, for comparison purposes as well as to make sure i’m able to enjoy at least one of the pizzas.
and here are a couple of my dough children. two of the three. i made these yesterday, based on some ridiculous recipe i found on reddit.
after several attempts at doughs based on others’ work and my own adjustments with the incredible pizza dough calculator, last time i made pizza i decided to give some random redditor’s recipe a try based on their pictures, and i ended up making my best pizza to date.
it was glorious. despite the fact that the recipe is thrown together with sloppy volumetric measurements rather than weights, with shit like “just keep throwing flour in there”, it somehow produced everything i have been looking for in a pizza. so i stuck with that recipe this time, the only modifications being a bit more sugar and making use of the finer 00 flour. but even if everything turns out the same as last time, i’d still be happy.
my remaining modifications for these pizzas include altering the cheese by dicing rather than shredding (to hopefully obtain better browning), and making my own italian sausage for topping at least one of the pizzas. gotta find a recipe for that still. should be a lot easier than the pepperoni though.
jesus i want pizza now.