Tonight, I whipped up another pizza for dinner. I was already set up with ingredients from last week: sausage, cooked onions, tomato sauce, and mozzarella cheese. So no time spent there. This time, I used a recently purchased pizza screen. The pizza screen worked pretty well. At least initially. I was worried that the pizza might sink in between the holes in the screen and stick to it. But it didn’t. However, it was removed from the hot stone (an aluminum screen is not very conductive). So it didn’t brown as well as it could have.

There were problems however. Last week, I mixed more dough up and let it sit in the refrigerator over the week. Which was, of course, packed full. So I crammed them in where ever they would fit. And wouldn’t you know it but one of them fell down. Yesterday, I noticed that the plastic container had broken a hole in it. Fortunately, the dough was not dried out. So I patched the hole with scotch tape. The second problem was the fact that it is a really wet dough. I thought I was good about sprinkling flour on it when I was rolling it out. But it eventually stuck to the counter. I pulled it off and reformed a new ball and rolled it out again. Maybe the second time around it was a little tougher with that extra gluten from kneading back into shape.

For the next time, I am going to try to “blind bake” the dough. Put just the dough on the screen and then cook it for a minute or two. And quickly pull it off. Put the toppings on, and use the peel to transfer it back and finish cooking it.

Update:
I left the dough in the final shape too long on the counter. The dough absorbed the light flour dusting and stuck to the counter. I did blind bake the dough. But when I took it out and went to put the toppings on it, I learned that the wet dough steamed a lot. Water condensed on the bottom, which was not good. Also, this time I heated the stone for a good 45 minutes. The temperature went up to 750 degrees. And after 5 minutes, I went outside and found that the bottom had burned. There was a thick crust of carbon. Next time, I am going back to the screen and the longer preheating time.