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July 2010
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My wife and I have a New Year's Eve tradition that avoids the crowds: We pick out some gourmet foods that we don't normally eat, put a fire in the fireplace, find some movie to watch, and toast the new year by toasting marshmallows. This year, we'd been watching a lot of food shows lately and saw both Emeril and Rachael Ray doing rather different deep dish pizzas. I added a quick check to see what the food wizards at Cooks Illustrated suggested. And Googled for "Chicago deep dish pizza recipe." Head for the jump to see what I pulled from them all -- to create an incredible pizza that I won't claim beat Pizza Uno's best, but I'm a long way from Chicago. This isn't so much a recipe as a set of tips: Start with whatever your best pizza dough is. In my case, it's a bread machine version (3 cups flour, 1/3 whole wheat. A quarter cup of olive oil, tsp sugar, pinch salt, water, yeast.) Get the dough to the point where you can work it. Grated cheese: More than you think you'll need, particularly if you're used to making regular pizzas. I used a mozzarella/Romano mix. Fire up a hot oven: 425. Use a baking stone if you have it. I have a large, thick aluminum baking sheet that works pretty well. Make sure the stone or whatever has plenty of time to get hot. Filling: Dealer's choice. I sauteed onions and mushrooms and then added some Bosnian-style no-casing beef sausage I'd picked up at a Zituna's World Food Market, a Moroccan/Middle Eastern market at Arapaho and Coit that has the best selection of no-pork meat products I've seen in the area. (Muslim Halal rules fit perfectly with my innards's unfortunate unhappiness with pig.) And then dumped in some decent bottled tomato pasta sauce, one of Newman's. But not enough to make it soupy -- it was pretty thick by the time I mixed it all up. Find a deep-dish pan. in my case, it was a large saute pan, not non-stick. Drizzle the bottom with olive oil. Roll out the dough so that it's large enough to more than fill the bottom of the pan and press it in, creating a rim that's a couple of inches high. Prick the surface with a fork and drizzle oil on top. Then into the oven for about 10 minutes, until it's got a good start. (Mine puffed up a bit in the middle but I pushed it back down and it worked out fine.) Then take it out and add the fillings. Put the cheese in first. Lots and lots of cheese. (This ain't a health food recipe, friends...) I ended up using about 4 oz of Romano and more than twice that of the mozzarella. Then dump on the topping/sauce mix. Then top liberally with grated Parmesan. Other than a bit of salt with the onions and some dried oregano mixed with the cheeses, I added no other spices. The sauce and sausage were strong enough for my tastes. Back in the oven for another 20 minutes or so -- until the center of the pizza is bubbling. It was perfect. The cheeses and filling had married. The crust was crisp -- you could hear the crackle as the pizza cutter rolled through it. Here are what I picked up as "tricks." The olive oil on the bottom of the pan -- added flavor and made release no problem. The pre-baking -- set up the crust so it didn't get mushy. Put the cheese in before the sauce, which is mixed with the topping -- ditto as a protection for the crisp crust. Lots of Parmesan as the last ingredient -- it blended wonderfully with the topping. I've made many regular pizzas over the years with great success, but that experience would not have led me to those techniques. As for the amounts and times, your mileage may vary, depending on how big a pan you use, how thick you want your cheese, and what kind of filling you prefer. My bottom line: Would I do it again? Would I do it for company? Ubetcha to both. Archived Comments |
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A great resource for those looking to recreate a certain style of pizza at home is www.pizzamaking.com/forum . They have threads for all kinds of pizza - and you will find loads of recipes where posters have reversed engineered pizzas from their favorite restaurants. The people are very friendly so don't hesitate to ask questions. Deep dish is probably the easiest to reproduce at home given the temperature limitations of home ovens - unless you want to monkey around with the lock on the self cleaning cycle :)
*Do* check out that link. Foodie heaven for pizza. But boy, howdy, do some of these folks take their pizzas seriously. Spreadsheets and measurements to the mm and the gram. But very friendly and willing to take on queries from newbies. And lovely photos of a wide variety of 'zzas. Some you've probably never heard of...
That was the first pizza I ever made. Now you've got me craving it!
One fine blog entry, Mr. Weiss. However, the oven mitts clash with the sweater.
Heh. I'll take that up with my wife...1:-{)>