Sweet home Chicago-style deep dish you can make yourself
Who doesn't love hot-out-of-the-oven pizza?
My favorite is a cracker crisp, thin-crust pizza, followed closely by virtually the opposite; Chicago-style deep dish pizza.
For some unknown reason during the last few months, I've been fixated on making pizza at home. It began with finding a frozen gluten-free crust (Trader Joe's is decent). Then, looking to keep preparation time to a minimum I tried and liked Trader Joe's organic frozen pizza crust.
I started making pizza more than 50 years ago using boxed ingredients and sausage from the local A&P grocery store. Over the following years, I slowly learned how to make better and better pizza. During my college years, I delivered pizzas in the summer for college money. Since I lived in Evanston, my first two summers were spent hustling pizzas for Gigio's Pizzeria.
After closing time, I'd get to spin my own pizza crust and bake one off before the ovens were shut down. After college, I started making my own crust and sauce. And, for my first cookbook, I created an Italian sausage pizza that many people thought rivaled any commercial pie. The one pizza I never attempted was a deep dish pizza, like Uno's Pizzeria on Ohio.
About a week ago I saw a recipe for making a deep-dish pizza in a cast iron skillet, replicating the type of heavy, blackened pans that pizzerias use. I searched for other deep-dish pizza recipes done in an iron skillet and discovered one for J. Kenji López-Alt's Foolproof Pan Pizza on the seriouseats.com website.
López-Alt wasn't looking to duplicate Uno's, nor was I. He wanted a: " ... thick-crusted, fried-on-the-bottom, puffy, cheesy, focaccia-esque pan pizza." Yessss ... me, too.
López-Alt makes his crust from scratch. I'm sure it's outstanding, but that's too much of a hassle for me. That's why I headed to Whole Foods and bought a ball of their pizza dough, along with pizza sauce, and organic sliced and shredded mozzarella cheeses.
It's been a long time since I was this excited about my kitchen experiments and even though the weather and heat made it seem like baking anything was a bad idea, my central air helped reduce those concerns.
I located some organic sweet Italian sausage, along with an organic sweet pepper and onion. A short stop at my supermarket got me some uncured turkey pepperoni and I headed home.
Because the pizza dough was refrigerated, I lightly brushed my skillet with olive oil and placed the dough ball in the center of the pan; flattening it out a little. During the hour it took for the dough to warm and rise, I got everything else ready; slicing the onion and pepper and sauteing and breaking-up the Italian sausage.
One of the things I like about deep dish pizza is its high cheese content, which is why I laid down a layer of sliced mozzarella on the crust first, followed by the sauce. I topped the shredded cheese with the thin-sliced onions. To boost the flavor, you can caramelize the onions first.
Taking my oven up to 550 degrees, something I'd never done before, concerned me a little. When I opened my oven door to put the pizza in some smoke billowed out and tripped my smoke alarm. Ugh.
My pizza took a short 15 minutes and emitted an incredible aroma around my kitchen and through the house. When I pulled my new skillet pizza from the oven, it looked fantastic. I let it rest a bit before sliding it out of the pan onto a cutting board. I divided it into six pieces and quickly headed to the dinner table.
The crust emerged beautifully browned on the bottom from the high-heat oven, but its interior was somewhat fluffy, like a focaccia; López-Alt would have been proud of me. One slice, with a salad, would have been plenty, except that it tasted soooo good I had to have a little more.
My skillet-based, deep-dish pizza was an immense success. I can't wait to make it again. The only change will be to turn off my smoke alarm until the pizza's ready.
Give it a try.
• Don Mauer welcomes questions, comments and recipe makeover requests. Write to him at don@theleanwizard.com.