Pizza at Home - Ground Pepperoni Stuffed Crust Pizza

Happy Sunday! It's Pizza Day! 

While we're in Colorado, I'm still making pizzas and I'm taking requests! I've made a bunch of pizzas over the last year so there's lots of options. 

This week Megan gets to pick. She saw the Ground Pepperoni pizza I made last year when we made the Belmont Shore Stroll and Savor at home, but had a special request. Make it with Stuffed Crust!

Done! 

To start, I'm going to need a few sticks of pepperoni. Sliced pepperoni is a little too thin for my liking. 

I quartered the sticks put them into my food processor. 

About 30 seconds later, my pepperoni is looking good! 

Most sites I see for stuffed crust recipes suggest using string cheese sticks for the crust. I don't have cheese sticks right now, but I do have a big bag of mozzarella cheese. Plus with this, I can make the stuffed crust as big as I want. It's always disappointing when you get barely any cheese inside your pizza crust. I also don't want the cheese to go completely liquid while it's cooking. To combat that, after I made all my cheese logs, using the pizza pan as a guide, I put them in the freezer. 

A couple hours later and it was time to make the pizza! The dough is my own recipe. I'm making a few pizzas tonight, but for the stuffed crust I made sure to add a little more flour and knead the dough for a few minutes. I need a stretchier, chewier dough that can wrap around my cheese sticks without splitting. 

The dough is stretched and now it's time to fold it over. 

These homemade cheese sticks are massive. Like 2-3 times the size of a normal cheese stick. Eventually I was able to get the dough to close over the top and seal down to the base. 

It's like a swimming pool. Even after adding the sauce and a sprinkling of cheese, there's still quite a bit of room left. 

Quite a bit of room left for a pound of ground pepperoni! 

See any spots of cheese? This is 100% covered with pepperoni. 

It went into the oven looking like this. Pepperoni almost to the top of the crust. 

And the pizza does still like to rise in the oven, so it sank back down a little. I cooked it on my pizza stone to make sure it had a nice crunchy crust, then finished it off on the top rack to get some of those pepperoni bits crunchy. 

Since I'm feeding a few people, I'm making a few other pizzas too. There's a meat lovers pizza with pepperoni, sausage, ham, bacon, and red pepper flakes. 

Which turned out amazing. 

A tale of three sauces. This pizza is divided into thirds. Alli with extra sauce and no cheese, Ian with regular sauce, and Theresa with a "breath of sauce" on her third. 

Alli has no toppings. Ian has his regular pepperoni slices. Theresa is having olives, mushrooms, ham, pepperoni. 

And people usually like a Hawaiian pizza too. 

That's four pizzas tonight! Let's eat them!

I was really curious what my stuffed crust was going to look like when I cut into it. Would my frozen cheese sticks thaw? Would they turn to complete liquid? 

Well that's just about as perfect as I can make it. Oozy mozzarella cheese coming out that still has some structure. 

Alright, what does Megan say? 

Thumbs up! It is delicious. 

Sampling all of the different flavors. 

Ian was happy with his pizza. When he saw the stuffed crust pepperoni he asked if he could cut off the crust since he didn't want the cheese. Don't worry buddy. I've got you covered. I made a regular pepperoni pizza just for you. 

And Alli is giving me a smily face for her sauce only pizza. 

Can I do a cheese stretch with this? Absolutely. There's so much cheese here. 

The crust was really good on this one, and the cheese was great. The pepperoni sticks were a little spicier than the pepperoni slices we're used to, and I loved that. Of all the pizzas we had tonight, this was my favorite. 

Is all that pepperoni a little greasy? Maybe just a little. But it's delicious! Good pick Megan!