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.