by A.J. Coltrane
The Batali Pizza Dough recipe has sort of become my go-to-almost-fast-food-pizza-dough. There’s only 45 minutes of rising time, so dinner can be on the table in an hour.
Here’s one that’s steaming hot out of the oven covered with onions, italian sausage, and red peppers. The sausage got slightly precooked to avoid rawness. The thinly sliced onions and peppers went on raw. There’s also some cheese hiding under the sauce.
FlatbreadGarden 
What, no cute pictures of the cats?
Any reason you went with sauce over the cheese instead of the other way around? Looks really tasty
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What I’ve found is that often cheese will either burn and/or get an unpleasant texture if it’s on top of the sauce for the entire baking time.
With the understanding that, for me, a pizza will take 14-18 minutes to cook at 500F, I usually either:
A. Add the cheese at the 8-10 minute mark. (Usually 10 minute mark, total cooking time 16 minutes.)
or
B. Hide the cheese from the worst of the heat by putting it under the sauce.
It may be that if I was better about preheating the oven for a long time and I used a heavy pizza stone then the pizzas would cook faster, and I wouldn’t have to do anything special with the cheese.
I have a hard time justifying running the oven full blast for an hour while it’s empty.
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