Extra Cheesy Pizza (Milan-Style) | Anything With Alvin

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Join us in making this cheesy, doughy, delicious pizza al trancio milano, inspired by Pizzeria Spontini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNahqjOsogo

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– [Narrator] This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. I used Squarespace to build both basicswithbabish and bingingwithbabish.com. On the sites, you’ll find recipes, equipment lists, other news and updates, all beautifully designed if I do say so myself. Get 10% off your first Squarespace order by visiting squarespace.com/babish. – [Alvin] Hello there. Welcome back to another episode of “Anything with Alvin”, where I make food from videos that I like to watch in my spare time. This time I’m gonna be taking on making the pizza al trancio, or sliced pizza popularly served at the establishment in Milan called Spontaneity Pizza.

This type of pizza is large, thick, and loaded with lots of cheese, super gooey, and really, really delicious looking. So I’ve been always curious to see what it actually might taste like. Based on the size of this pan that we got, I think we’re in for a good time.

Let’s start with the dough. Now there’s actually a couple of recipes offered by the establishment themselves. So we kind of took the liberty to go around and collect them all. In a large stand mixer, I’m combining 450 grams of 00 flour, five grams of dry instant yeast, 4.5 grams of kosher salt,

And 300 grams of water. This is all going to get mixed up until it’s about a shaggy dough, roughly five to eight minutes. Once the dough is ready, this is gonna get turned out onto the work surface and just knead it until it becomes a nice smooth ball.

Let’s give this dough a nice proof under a moist towel for about 30 minutes until it has gotten doubled in size. Onto the pizza sauce. Now this one is pretty simple. It’s just two 28 ounce cans of crushed tomatoes, a tablespoon of salt, half a tablespoon of pepper,

And half a tablespoon of dried oregano. Just blitz together with an immersion blender to make sure it’s smooth and that’s it. Sometimes simple is better. Now that our dough’s gotten a little bit bigger, we’re gonna put this onto our cutting board and roll this out until it becomes a nice disc.

Then the dough gets transferred into our pan, but not before we put a little bit of oil just to make sure that the dough didn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. This dough seems to have a lot of oil based on the videos that we’ve been watching, kind of like a focaccia.

So I’m curious to see how this turns out. We also did have some extra dough on the side, so we’re gonna make a smaller personal size pan pizza, so to speak, repeating the same process and letting that proof in there as well. Once another 30 minutes have passed

And our dough has gotten a second proof, the sauce goes on ladeled and spread in a nice even circle until it is ready for the oven. The unique part about this pizza seems to be this step where they pour a lot of oil around the edges of the dough

Before it’s even baked to make sure that there’s enough, I guess, oil to crisp up the sides before it goes into the oven. This kind of reminds me of Pizza Hutt. Little sprinkle of dried oregano on top of the sauce and into the oven. Our oven has been preheating

At 450 degrees with a pizza stone just to make sure that it’s hot. We’re gonna let this go for about, let’s say, 10 minutes. Now in the video , the Spontaneity employee seems to pull out the pizza at stages to check the inside

And also the bottom of the pizza with a knife to make sure that there’s enough browning on the bottom and adds oil to make sure that there’s a lot more crispiness. So we’re gonna do the same, back in the oven for another five minutes or so.

Then we’re gonna pull out the pizza one more time and add a lot of cheese. This is roughly about 300 to 400 grams of low moisture mozzarella that’s been thinly sliced and layered on top. And this is gonna go back in the oven for another 10 minutes

Or so until the cheese has gotten golden and it is nice and melted. Now we’re gonna do the same thing with the small personal size pizza. Put the sauce on the pizza, put it in the oven, put the cheese on, same deal. The first pizza looks a little flat,

So we’re gonna take that out and put a lot of pepperoni on it because that’s the one way you can solve all your pizza problems. Smaller pizza does come out a little bit better. The dough is a little bit taller and has the thickness that we are looking for.

So we’re gonna take this one, cut it up for snacks, and we’re gonna take the first one out. Basically just made a giant pepperoni pizza. Cut that one up for snacks as well to feed the whole studio because everybody’s been waiting and smelling pizza all day long.

I think the issue with the first pizza was that it actually proofed in an environment that wasn’t humid or warm enough. We kind of just put it downstairs without a cover. So this time we’re gonna redo the dough, but we’re gonna make sure that the pizza goes

Under a moist paper towel the second time. So both proofs are gonna be in heat and moisture. Same thing, make the dough, roll out the dough, put it in the pan with the oil, Let it proof, this time in a better environment,

And we’re gonna make sure that we prepare it the same way, but we’re also gonna multiply the cheese by two because this is an extra cheesy pizza. We’re also gonna crank the heat up to 500 degrees in order to get a better rise on the dough in the oven.

And this seems to be working very well. The cheese is very gooey and melty, the dough is thicker and it looks closer to the original than we’d ever expected. So we’re gonna slide this boy out, cut it up into slices, six very, very thick cheesy slices.

Look at that cheese bowl right here. That’s a good one. And then we’re gonna take one of these slices and use a cleaver and chop it up into these little square chunks, just like they serve it in Italy. And we’re gonna put this on a plate and eat this cube by cube.

Hmm, this is pretty good. When I’m eating this, I don’t actually think of pizza. This reminds me more of like a cheesy pizza bread than an actual classic pizza, which is basically what we’re doing. The bottom is nice and crispy and has that nice fried crunchy taste that Pizza Hut and focaccia has.

Honestly, I actually like putting a little bit of sauce on the side and dipping a cue of this into the sauce. So it’s like a cheesy bread you dip in your tomato sauce. We did make three large gigantic pizzas, and to make sure that none of this goes to waste,

I’m gonna take all the pizza that we got, cut them into little cubes, and divide this up into little boxes for everybody to take home because pizza should be shared with everyone. – [Narrator] Thanks again to Squarespace for sponsoring today’s episode. They’ve been a great partner in supporting the Babish Culinary Universe

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