Joe,
Cheese is an ongoing problem for me where I live and with my oven. To begin with, there are only two places near me where I can get whole-milk mozzarella cheese, which I believe holds up better in my oven without breaking down and oiling up my pizza or browning too much, especially for long bake times where I am trying to get a drier, crispier crust. One of the places where I can get whole-milk cheeses is at Wal-Mart, which carries the Wal-Mart Great Value brand of mozzarella cheese. I do not particularly like that brand because it breaks down too quickly in my oven and leaves an orange oil film on my pizza. It is also hard to shred or cut into slices or dice because it is too soft for that purpose. I can get a solid whole-milk mozzarella cheese in an Italian market in Dallas, but they don’t always have it in stock.
Because of the limited cheese choices in my area, I usually wait until I travel back East where I can get Grande and other good brands of whole-milk mozzarella cheese. I usually buy and bring back several pounds of whole-milk mozzarella cheeses, which I portion into roughly 6-ounce pieces, and freeze (in Deni suck-and-seal bags). As you noted in an early study you conducted on freezing cheese, if the cheese is used within a reasonable time frame, it will work well on pizzas. It may be a bit harder to shred because it can be on the crumbly side, but that is the price I have to pay. Maybe dicing it will work better.
I also use less cheese than most on my pizzas. That works against using long bake times, even at lower oven temperatures, because the mass of cheese is less and can cook too quickly. To compensate, I will sometimes use either cold cheese, larger pieces or chunks of cheese (which are likely to melt more slowly), or “shards” of cheese, which are very large shreds produced by using the curved, larger cutting edge of my box grater. I got the idea for the shards of cheese after seeing Dom DeMarco at DiFara’s use his grater to do this. The only time that I have used diced cheese is where I have bought the cheese in slices from the deli section at the supermarket, such as a Boar’s Head whole-milk mozzarella cheese, and diced it to make it easier to use on my pizzas. I can’t say that I noticed a big difference over shredded cheese, although I liked the quality and taste of the Boar’s Head brand of mozzarella.
As you can see, for me the particular form of the mozzarella cheese that I use is geared more to adapting the cheese to my oven and the types of pizzas I am trying to make. As an example, I have recently been experimenting with making cracker-style pizzas. In my oven, that means having to use a long bake time to get the degree of crispiness and cracker quality I am after, whether I pre-bake the crusts or not. Keeping the cheeses from breaking down is one of my biggest problems, requiring me to spend as much time thinking about how to use the cheeses as how to get the best crust. The Domino’s pizza that I purchased, which is shown at
http://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php/topic,5173.msg48331.html#msg48331 (Reply 27), was to have an example of a commercial cracker crust to compare mine against. The Domino’s pizza took about 6-7 minutes to bake in the Domino’s Middleby Marshall conveyor oven and, as the photo shows, the cheese (diced) did not break down. In my oven, even with a pre-baked crust, it will take longer than 6-7 minutes to bake my pizza and the cheese won’t hold up as well. The solution may lie in the size and shape that the cheese takes, as alluded to by scott r, but it may also lie in the temperature of the cheese or possibly even putting the cheese under the sauce rather than on top of it.
Peter
