I tried a couple new things this time and was amazed at how well they worked.
First, I re-arranged my oven. I have a gas oven with no broiler (well, there is, but it's a drawer under the oven - unacceptable) and have been trying to find the sweet spot to get the bottom nice and crisp but getting the top done at the same time. Before, with only the fiberment I had a beautiful crust with barely melted cheese or a burnt crust (I am talking totally carbonized) and a good looking top. I had the idea to take a cheap old broken home and garden party stone and use it for some thermal mass on top. This helped a bit, but not enough. Then I figured I would line the rack with tin foil to get the reflective effect. This worked much better. I have been experimenting with various positions in the oven and I found this works best. The other nice thing with this config is that the thermostat is above the tin foil, so I got the oven up to nearly 700 deg (which is an estimate based on how far past 600 the oven thermometer seen in the picture went). The last part to the equation was using a screen to make the bottom cook a little slower. All these combined turned out a slightly crispy crust that still had some bend to it.
Second, the dough changes. This time I went with a 64% hydration KASL based dough, but I added some lactic acid powder to mimic the taste of a sourdough culture and some vitamin c to make the dough a bit more elastic. The resulting dough handled much better than I am used to and tasted better than 99% of crust that I have ever eaten. I used Jeff Varasano's wet kneading / "autolyze" (not a true autolyze) technique and Tony Gemignani's method for pushing out/tossing dough (covering with half semolina/half high gluten flour instead of putting the flour on the table). It also helped a bunch to use the plain counter top instead of the wooden cutting board as I have been doing before. I haven't been very successful in tossing dough before because I could only get one or two tosses before it got paper thin in the middle, these changes allowed me to toss 8-10 times while keeping it relatively uniform. One of the problems with my unscientific approach (changing more than one variable at a time) is that I don't know whether the wet knead or the addition of vitamin c were primarily responsible for the better handling qualities or if they both worked together, which I suspect is the case.
Last, the sauce. I have been using a heavily modified version of Peter's PJ clone sauce and this time decided to grind up all the spices in a coffee grinder before adding to the 6-1. This resulted in a sauce that was noticeably better tasting than the exact same thing with unground spices. I would like to try november's microwaving technique for it, but we prefer a toaster oven to microwave, so I don't have one to try it with.
Anyway, here are the pics. Thanks everyone, especially Peter and November for all your help.
