I need to watch my cholesterol and saturated fat intake due to family history. If I'm going to eat pizza, I need to use part-skim cheese. After a lot of frustration trying to achieve decent browning of my crust without ending up with burned cheese, I think I finally came up with a way of doing it, and wanted to share it.
Two days ago, I made a 10-day cold ferment Glutenboy dough, and topped it with cubed part-skim Dragone mozzarella. I cut the cubes freehand, aiming for around a 3/16" cube. The cheese on the plain cheese pie is a browned in places (but that was more because I kept running into the family room to check on the Seahawks-Redskins game and left it in around 30 seconds too long).
The pie went into a 550 degree oven on convection for 3 minutes, followed by 2 minutes under the broiler on high (about 7 inches from the broiler) for the cheese pie, and around 90 seconds for the broccoli pie. In the past, I couldn't use high on the broiler for more than around 30 seconds, and was settling for crusts that weren't browned quite enough for me. This time it worked, even though I didn't spray any EVOO on the cheese to help the melting, as I had been doing in the past (I just forgot the EVOO). I suspect that the extra 3-4 days of cold fermentation helped with browning.
Hope this might help others.
Barry
