Boston Cheese Party Pizza Recipe

I’ve been on a huge cheese kick for the last six months or so, picking up a new one to try every time I went to the grocery store. As it turns out, I went kind of overboard and some of the cheese was starting to go back before I could finish it. (RIP truffle cheddar from Seattle, Great Hill Blue, and 3 year Grafton.)  Like any good girl boss though, when faced with this problem, I came up with a solution: throw it all on a pizza together. Boom. Boston Cheese Party.

Looking through my fridge, I had an abundance of cheese options. I know that eating all of these cheeses on a plate work out pretty well together, but melting them all together was a whole new story. Ultimately, I played it safe with the mozzarella, provolone, romano, and parmesan base. I have a hunk of danish blue cheese that I don’t really like snacking on by itself, but have used in buff chicken dip before. In the name of using that up, it made the list, along with the ricotta from last week.

How did this pizza come out? Actually amazing. One of the best pizzas I’ve made, like, easily top 3. I definitely want to tweak the recipe and make this again in the future. Turns out you really can’t go wrong just throwing a ton of cheese together.

Ingredients:

• 1 ball of pizza dough
• Shredded mozzarella cheese
• Romano or Parmesan grated cheese
• Shredded “pizza” cheese (mine was a mozz/provolone/parm/romano mix)
• Pizza sauce (I used Rao’s Roasted Garlic Sauce with RawSpiceBar pizza spices and oregano mixed in)
• Part-skim ricotta cheese
• Spices to taste (I used oregano)

Note: I eyeball the amounts use – practice makes perfect.

Directions:

1. About 90 min – 2 hours before you plan on making the pizza, put the dough out to rise. I put it in a chip bowl with flour and cover it with a tea towel.
2. Preheat your oven to 500F or as high as it will go. Make sure your pizza stone is in the oven… I’ve forgotten once or twice.
3. Put a sheet of parchment paper on your pizza peel and flour it up.
4. Stretch the dough out so that it covers the peel – this week I ripped off about 1/5 of the dough to not use, because I wasn’t in the mood for big fat edge pieces.
5. Put olive oil on the pizza crust, especially the edges. This helps your pizza brown up in the oven.
6. Put the pizza sauce on the pizza, followed by the mozzarella cheese. Make sure you put the toppings on all the way to the edges of the pizza.
7. Add the provolone/mozz/romano/parm shredded cheese, some extra grated cheese, blue cheese crumbles, and oregano.
8. Add a couple of dollops of ricotta onto your pizza. You should be ready to cook!
9. Slide the pizza and parchment pizza onto the pizza stone and start a stopwatch or timer to keep track of how long it’s in the oven.
10. At about the 4-5 minute mark, you should be able to slide the parchment paper out from between the pizza and the pizza stone.
11. Let it cook until the crust and cheese starts to brown. My oven claims to go up to 500F but I’m pretty sure it’s actually much lower, and from start to finish, it usually takes about 11 minutes for a pizza to cook.
12. Slide the pizza out, cut it up, and serve with some wine! I went with Barefoot Cab Sav this week.