Deep Pan Pizza

This isn't your thin crust olive oil gourmet pizza, this is thick, nasty and deep. That's the way we like our pizzas with plenty of meat on top. It might not be fancy for you but to my mate it's the fanciest thing they're ever going to get. You'll need a forklift to pick up the slice, they're going to love this one. To make this dough I've adapted a focaccia dough recipe and that way I get plenty of lift and plenty of deep pan pizza action which is what it's all about. I know people like their thin crust and people are going to be walking out of the room but this is all about fancy food for my mates and this is how easy it is. 500 grams of plain flour, 10 grams of dried yeast. I've also got about a tablespoon of salt and a tablespoon of sugar. 500 mils of lukewarm water straight into the centre like that. There's a lot of hydration which means there's a lot of water in this and the dough will be very very sticky. It's a bit of fun to use and it's going to be delicious. All you need to do is mix it around like this till you've got all of that flour mixed in and look at that ready to go. What I like to do now is cover this with cling film to let it prove and get all those bubbles forming in the dough. This dough I did about an hour ago and what I see is all of these bubbles starting to form and you can see the dough is nice and sticky. Drizzle a little bit of olive oil on the top there and with my hand I pick up the side like this and flop it down on its side there. I go around and knock it back. What we're doing is making the dough do some work and rise again and that way it'll be nice and sticky and nice and thick. So what I did is I put the dough onto the tray that was well oiled and I put a bit of baking paper underneath it and you can see all these bubbles starting to form here. Now with a good pizza you need to start with some base on the bottom. So I've got a really good thick sauce and I spread it around. You can see as I put the sauce on it actually moves the dough. This is a really light dough with plenty of air in it and that's what you want to give it a lovely bready thick deep dish pizza kind of look. So spread plenty of sauce around the outside and now we start loading it up. Cheese on the bottom is really really important that's what gives you the stretch. This is mozzarella cheese and you just tear off bits of it and spread it all around the pizza. Now these are some mushrooms I'm going to spread around because we need a couple of little veggies on there. Spread these king browns all the way around there like that. I've got a meat lover's pizza. I love my meat and this pizza will be delicious. We start off with a very thin layer of thinly shredded bacon. That's going to build the base of our meat lover's pizza and some salami. This is some nice casalinga salami that I made myself. Plenty of salami on there and you're probably thinking Richo that's enough salami. No it's not. We need some more on here. As I said this is a meat lover's pizza. This is for lovers of meat and people that cannot live without lots and lots of meat in their diet and on their pizza. Look at that and some ham too. This is lovely Virginia ham that I got from my deli. You want to make sure that every single mouthful of pizza gets a big chunk of meat in it and it's all about the meat in my life. Now we need some sausage. Sausage is fantastic on a pizza and I always cut some little bits of sausage on top there like that. I don't even take it out of the skin because as this sausage roasts all that skin will go nice and crispy and fall apart and just melt in your mouth the way a good sausage should. This is what a real meat lover's pizza should look like and I am a meat lover. A little bit of oregano on there because we need some subtle flavours and a little bit of jalapeno chilli. What could be better than that? And of course I love red onion. That will caramelise and give it a lovely sweet flavour and I've got some cheese left over here. A couple of pieces on the top there like that just to melt and give you that gooey flavour. That is looking like a great pizza. My mate's gonna love it and a little drizzle of olive oil to make it fry up beautifully. This will go into an oven at 220 degrees. Nice and hot. You want to bake it, get everything lifting up here and you want to cook those lovely sausages on top. Now that is a fancy pizza. A meat lover's pizza with all of my favourite ingredients and I think if I hold it up anymore my arms will break into the oven we go. I think I might need an oxygen mask to get through this thing. It looks fantastic and I know it's going to hurt me where it should. Slice that down the middle there and I'll cut another little piece here. That is a good looking pizza. Smells fantastic and all the meat varieties you could possibly want on one morsel of pizza dough. And you know with all that meat there's no room on here for pineapple. Pineapple belongs in a pina colada. Pizza is just for meat.