Sawsheezle's Pizza Party: Chicago Style Deep Dish Edition

So we have explored yeast doughs and enjoyed them. We have looked into baking soda based thin crusts and loved on them. Now we conquered 2D pizza (thin crust) and now it's time for 3D pizza aka Chicago Deep Dish. Much of this post was inspired by an amazing write up

http://sallysbakingaddiction.com/2014/12/31/how-to-make-chicago-style-deep-dish-pizza/

Here are some things you're going to need:

For the Dough
3.25 C of bread flour (capital_prototype and Sawsheezle recommend King Arthur brand)
0.25 C of corn meal
1 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp active dry yeast
1.5-2 C water (be careful)

Sauce
1 28 ounce can of Crushed tomatoes
2 Tbsp of butter
some garlic, basil, red pepper flakes
salt and pepper to taste
sugar (varies)

Hardware
1 stand mixer (Bosch preferred)
1 rolling pin
1 beer chalice for drinky times
1 restored pre-WWII cast iron skillet

Let's get mixing...

You see that cornmeal in there? Supposedly real chicago style deep dish has no cornmeal, but after adding it...it just felt right...more commentary at the end. This was an incredibly hard dough to knead. I added more than the recipe suggested amount of water...maybe twice as much. Just slowly add it over time until your mixer starts kneading it well. This is a bread type dough though...it will be super dense. Once kneaded, cover in olive oil and place in a bowl for fermentation in the fridge. This dough was made on a Thursday for a Saturday pizza.

Here are my sauce makings. You can follow the link above for recommendations on ingredient amounts or look back to my old posts about making sauce, but the trick here was to just cook it down until it thickened up. Crushed tomatoes are the perfect choice here. One thing to note: I wanted a sweet sauce that was inspired by the Chicago Style Pizzeria back home (now defunct), I added 6 Tbsp of white sugar to the sauce. This ended up being nice and sweet actually, but I will try different combinations of sweeteners in the future to add more flavor to the sauce.

At this time, turn the oven on to 425 degrees Fahrenheit. I put my pizza stone on the rack below where I intended to put this pizza...more to just stabilize the temperature of the oven. Before anything though, get that dough out of the fridge and let it sit for an hour to get closer to room temperature. Now it's time for some magic....get that rolling pin out and roll out the dough thusly.

You also want to have that 2 Tbsp of butter ready. Make sure it is soft and spread it liberally on the rolled out dough. Then, roll it up from the short side (the left). It will look something like this:

Zoom in...can you see those layers? That is what excited me so much about this recipe...the flaky crust that was created by this method. Anyway, roll these dough logs into a ball again and let rise while you get things ready. Now get that cast iron skillet ready...look how shiny it is!

Now take that dough and roll it out...but not too thin...we don't want to have too much overflow from the edges.

First grease your pan with a bunch of butter and then put in the dough. Trim off excess around the lip of the pan. Then add mozzarella cheese until the pie is about halfway filled up.

Looking good right? Now add pepperoni and sausage. I chose to go raw with the sausage here since we will be cooking the pie for a long time. More flavor from the grease too.

Now fill up the rest with sauce and cover liberally with Parmesan cheese.

Put it in the oven now for 30-35 minutes...mine needed the full 35. While waiting, I took the excess dough trimmings and quickly tied them up into a little dough knot. I put it directly on the pizza stone and just took it out when it was done.

Can you that flaky texture? Once I saw that, I had high hopes fir this pie.

After 35 minutes it looked like this:

Gorgeous no? Maybe you say it looks burnt on the edges...nah that's just some crunch. Here is a slice of the pie.

And a side view to see that wall of crust:

Overall, this pizza was great. It was honestly about as good as I remember any of the deep dish za's I've had in Chicago or elsewhere...which is not many, but enough to know what it should taste like. I am so glad I branched out and visited the other end of the pizza world.

Sawsheezle fixing fridges

So you have a nice new modern "frost free" or self defrosting fridge eh? Guess what? It can still freeze over. It's actually pretty clever how they work, but most people don't even care to know. Well, I needed to know since lately I have been waking up to  finding standing water in my fridge. You see these things have defrost cycles that melt off any accumulated ice, some times things go awry....let's look into things...

That doesn't look so bad right? Let's pull up the bottom here and see what lies beneath.

Ice!!! Ice ahoy! A damn meat tenderizer mallet fixed that up right quick. But you see that aluminum in the back? That part of a drainage system. It clearly was backed up.

See that standing water? It's still frozen in this spout. It is supposed to drain sown into an evaporation plate that simply burns off the defrosted water collected in the freezer compartment. Anyway, I poured several rounds of hot water down the thing and snaked it with a long zip tie...eventually it was draining like a champ. Damn thing has been dicked.

Orange Sesame Beef

So, this week I made a super simple orange beef recipe. If you want, you can do much of the prep the night before and then just cook it in a hurry if you're short on time! First, the drink of the night:

Sake! Its not entirely appropriate as our entree is vaguely Chinese rather than Japanese, but I had this in my fridge and needed to get rid of it so: bottoms up!

Ingredients:

• ~1 lb beef, your choice of cut. doesn't have to be good stuff
• salt and pepper
• juice and zest from two oranges
• 2 tbsp sesame oil
• 2 tbsp rice vinegar
• 1 tbsp brown sugar
• 2 cloves garlic finely chopped
• 3 tbsp peanut oil
• 1 white onion, diced
• 1 cup beef stock
• rice

So, you're going to want to start by seasoning your beef with salt and pepper, then cut it into strips.

Next, in a large bowl, zest your oranges. I just used a cheese grater for this. Add the juice from the oranges, sesame oil, rice vinegar, brown sugar and garlic and stir. This will form your marinade.

Add your meat to the marinade and let it sit at room temperature for at least 30 minutes. At this point, you could put this all in a baggie in the fridge and save it for tomorrow if you wanted.

Heat the peanut oil in a pan. You'll want to get it nice and hot: I used my cast iron skillet for this and it worked nicely. Add the diced onion and cook until soft.

Once the onions are to your liking, add the beef and marinade. You're going to cook until the marinade thickens up, almost into a glaze. At this point, add the beef stock. (I had chicken stock on hand so I used that and it worked just fine.)

Again, simmer until the sauce is reduced down to almost a glaze. Serve over rice.

If you were ambitious, you could stir fry some veggies to go with this, but I was lazy and just wanted something quick and easy. That's all for this week!

Oribital Furniture Polisher?

So my coffee table was looking a bit faded...I decided to pull out my good ole orbital polisher and some simple fine car polish and see if I could buff it up. Here is my setup:

Beautiful porter-cable orbital polisher and some Chemical Guys car polish. I put some pieces of masking tape down for a before and after test. Here is a sample result:

It was really difficult to capture the difference beyond this photo, but I can assure you my table looks so shiny now. We already know about capital_prototype's and my side venture of headlight restoration...what can't this thing do?

Mexican Stuffed Shells

Another week, another recipe! Tonight we're making "Mexican" Stuffed Shells. Its kind of a white trash twist on a classic stuffed shells recipe. Total prep time: 1hr.

Before we get started, lets get a drink. Tonight we're fully embracing the white trashiness and drinking Surge and Stoli. Let the 90's flow through you.

For the shells, you'll need the following:

• 1 lb chorizo
• 4 oz cream cheese
• 12-15 jumbo pasta shells
• 1 large-ish bottle salsa
• 1 bottle taco sauce
• 2 cups mexican cheese of your choice
• green onions
• sour cream

Preheat your oven to 350 F.

Get a pot of water boiling for the shells. While that heats, start browning your chorizo in a pan. Put the shells in once the water boils and cook according to the directions on the box. Likely 12-15 minutes.

Once the chorizo is cooked through drain the fat, place back on the stove, add the cream cheese, and mix throughly. Remove from heat and allow to cool. This will end up being the filling for the shells.

Drain the pasta and set it out to cool. You'll probably want to separate the individual shells as they cool. This will help keep them from sticking together.

Cover the bottom of an oven safe casserole pan (or pans) with the salsa. Then fill your shells with the meat and place on the salsa. Top with the taco sauce (its not on the shells yet in the picture). Cover the pan with foil and place in the oven. Allow the shells to bake for about 30 minutes.

Remove the pan from the oven and cover the shells with cheese. Allow to bake for another 10 minutes or so, until the cheese is melted.

Plate the shells and garnish with sour cream and green onions.

Its not the classiest of meals, but its hearty and tasty! The leftovers also freeze nicely and can be microwaved later. Enjoy!

Frugal Cooling Rack

RyDub was right. Go to DollarTree and spend only $1 on some cheap Chinese bent steel. Look at how these perform.

For the record, these are two pieces I put together so they overlap. Seriously $1 only. The next best thing on Amazon is this. Sure they are criss cross construction ,but they cost almost 8 times as much as these!