Back in the late nineties, I got a wild hair up my butt and decided to make homemade pizza for dinner while rooming with my best friend. It was going to be a supreme pizza, with all the glorious toppings that make expensive pizzas great--large juicy clumps of Italian Sausage, scattered crumbles of Ground beef, several pepperoni slices on each piece, sliced mushrooms sauteed so that they aren't dried out, black olives, green pepper slices, and long stringy slices of yellow onions--not purple onions, that's just being cheap! And to top it all off, I was going to use more different types of cheese than I had ever found on a pizza anywhere, but it was going to be normal cheeses, the kind you can find in any grocery store. The result was a monster that barely fit on the oven, took most of the day to prepare, spent over an hour cooking, and had to be eaten with a fork because the crust could not support the weight of it. The cheese layer was almost an inch think in places. But that's an unfortunate consequence of how I prepared for it. (I'm not sure "unfortunate" is the proper word for that consequence.) I bought a block of each type of cheese, and spent several hours grating them into a massive bowl, resulting in about ten pounds of grated cheese. (A slight caveat here: The Ricotta cheese came in a tub, already broken up, so I didn't have to grate it). I ended up having to make two pizzas to use up even half of that bowl, and we put the second pizza in the freezer uncooked because it took us three days to eat the first one. So, without further brouhaha, here's the list of cheeses that went into that bowl.
Mozzarella (The King of Pizza Cheeses)
Cheddar (Gotta have some orange Cheese in there)
Provolone (A great-tasting white Cheese)
Monterrey Jack (another white Cheese)
Parmesan (Is this an Italian food, or what?)
Romano (another great Italian Cheese)
Swiss (Some Stronger-tasting white Cheese)
Colby (Not too much, it's oily)
Ricotta (Used sparingly on top, it's too soft for Pizza)
I browned the meats lightly (all together, even a bit of bacon, too), knowing that they would be getting cooked again in the oven, and I sauteed the mushrooms (both white and Portabello) along with the onions and minced garlic (Yes, I even poured some of the garlic water from the jar into the pan to enhance the garlic flavor), and bell pepper slices, and I prebaked the crusts with a light spread of butter before putting sauce on them, then spread the sauce on them when they had cooled, put half of the non-cheese toppings on them (except the pepperoni slices), covered that with cheese, put the second half of the non-cheese toppings (except the pepperoni slices), another layer of cheese, and then the pepperoni slices along with the pretty mushroom slices and black olives.
