An unexpected detour

I wasn't going to post about pizza again for a while but after my confident claim that pizza dough was quite forgiving, I feel I must come clean.

Friday night, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington on Turner Classic Movies, pizza... sounds like a good night to me and then I try to roll out the dough.

Uh oh.

This dough is not cooperating.

Mind you, this is exactly the same dough recipe I used for my last pie so I was unprepared. The only difference was, this time I made the dough ahead of time and put it in the refrigerator.

Maybe I didn't let it warm up enough on the counter before trying to roll it out but, this was a disaster. Every time I tried to stretch the dough to fit the pan it ripped.

Oh, spit! What to do, what to do? It was too late to scrap the dough and start again. Dominoes delivery does not extend to our neighborhood. I had to make do with what I had. Thin crust is now definitely out of the question so I decided to go with a deep dish pizza instead.

I pressed the dough into the pan and crossed my fingers.

I lined the crust as usual with provolone and topped it with some Italian sausage and red pepper pasta sauce we had on Bow Ties earlier in the week. I put it in the oven at 475 for 10 minutes and checked ... not long enough ...so back in the oven again for another 20 minutes.

At this point, the dough was looking pretty good and was done enough for me to be able to coax it out of the pan and onto the oven rack, topped with a couple of handfuls of shredded whole milk mozzarella. Ten minutes later I slid it out of the oven and onto a rack to cool and hoped for the best.

According to William it was the best deep dish pizza he's ever eaten. (He's been trained to say this.) But, darned if it didn't turn out much better than I dared hope.

There are two morals to this story. The first one is never say something is failproof. The second is, be flexible and work with what you've got. You may not end up with exactly what you had planned, but you just might end up with something even better.