Challenge mash-up time! Today is posting day for the October Daring Bakers Challenge AND my Eat Local Challenge update. As I feared, I spent a lot of the past week traveling and eating at friends houses and parties, but I did alright on eating locally at home. To top off the week, I used all-local ingredients to make my Daring Bakers October Challenge. Well, except the four. And being a baking challenge and all, there's a lot of flour. And the sugar isn't local either. There's not much of that, though. And the olive oil, that's an exception. So, ok, it's probably a 40% local pizza.

This week's challenge is hosted by Rosa's Yummy Yums, and you can find the recipe for the pizza dough there. It makes an incredibly smooth, silky and elastic dough. I ate a mouthful of the raw dough and it slurped and stretched between my teeth and lips like a slab of mochi pulled out of hot soup. The challenge calls for tossing the dough in the traditional manner, which was surprisingly successful in two out of three tries. On my second ball of dough, I caught the toss off-center, sending it crumpling in on itself and rendering it too tough to reshape— it made fine breadsticks, though.

I topped the pizza with a simple fresh garlic and olive oil sauce, pre-cooked sliced sweet potatoes, onions, some of my homemade guanciale, and some grated homemade gouda. While the pizza spent its eight minutes in the oven, I sauteed some shredded Brussels sprouts in the grease from the guanciale... mmm, the perfect side dish.