Deep Dish Pizza Quest, Part II

 Jesse Sutton-  

Okay, this isn't really an article, just a quickie.  I made a second attempt at Chicago-style deep dish pizza, and I wanted to document it.  If you haven't, check out part one of this series, where my quixotic quest for perfect pan pizza begins.  

Last week, I made my second attempt!  The results were productive, if not particularly earth-shattering.  I mean, even a mediocre Chicago-style pizza is earth-shattering by definition, but the results were not unusually earth-shattering.  To be honest, the levels of earth-shatteringness were sub-nominal by Chicago standards.  Still, improvements were made.  Let's go over the issues from the first attempt, and the steps taken to improve.

The Toppings: The toppings weren't really an area where drastic improvements were needed.  The cheese worked out fine, the sausage going in raw was great, and the tomato 'sauce' (really just seasoned, drained, canned diced tomatoes) worked out perfectly.  The area where I made an improvement was the spinach.  Last time I used one brick of Birdseye frozen spinach, drained, and sauteed with a little olive oil and sliced garlic.  The result was that the spinach kind of wilted away and got lost in the final pie.  This time around, I used 2 bricks of frozen (I haven't ever had a Chicago-style pizza that had apparently fresh spinach in it, but I could be wrong), and I just thawed and drained it rather than sauteeing it.  The result was a much more present and vibrant spinach component in the pie.  To replace the garlic, I just scattered the spinach layer with some sauteed sliced garlic.

The Crust: This was the area that needed improvement pretty drastically.  I am still working with the recipe from The Italian American Cookbook by John Mariani (expect that review to drop later today).  Last time, the issue was that it was just a bit bland, plus a single recipe was far too little for my 14# pizza pan, and a double was too large.  I put it into baker's percentages, scaled it to a recipe-and-a-half, and it was the perfect amount: plenty to fill the pan, with like 3 oz. of leftover for patchwork.  I switched the sugar to honey, tripled the amount, and doubled the salt.  These tweaks definitely boosted the flavor!  Making the recipe smaller meant I was able to knead it a little more thoroughly (which nearly killed my Kitchenaid...) and I'm not sure that was a good thing.  The texture was a little tougher, and the dough was more elastic and less pliable.  

I'm not sure if that's what caused the problem I had.  On attempt #1, the dough was pretty wet and tacky, and so instead of rolling it out, I just packed it into the pan piecemeal.  It came together perfectly.  I suspect that by dropping the batch size, and kneading it more thoroughly, I inadvertently made the packing-it-in-the-pan technique not work.  What happened was, the places where I had pressed bits of dough together left little faultlines in the pie, and they caught as I tried to slide it out of the pan, very nearly cracking the pizza in two and losing all the toppings in a molten, fragrant disaster.  I adjusted at the last second, got very lucky, and averted the disaster, but as this photo shows, all of the toppings slid about an inch to one side.

See the gap between the toppings and the crust on the right?  Also, if you look closely, you can see a bunch of little cracks in the outer crust where the newer, tougher dough wouldn't adhere to itself the way the last one would.  Rolling it out with a pin would have solved that issue, but the other issue is that the dough was less tender by far.  It had a nice crispness, but in this type of pizza, too much crispness can actually be a negative, since the dough is rolled so much thicker.  At the end of two slices, my jaw felt like I'd eaten an entire pack of grissini...  

So I'd call the crust a lateral improvement, at best.

Attempt II, Final Rating: 3.5/5 again.  Improvements made, but also setbacks, and I have to acknowledge how close this thing came to being a hard zero.  (I mean, I still would have eaten it.  Bad pizza, like bad porno, is still 100% effective.)

What's next: For toppings, nothing, not immediately.  As I stated before, the sausage and spinach pie is the quintessential Chicago deep dish pie, the same way the Margherita is the ultimate expression of Neapolitan-style.  (Or the way cold, greasy, folded over pepperoni that's been sitting under an anemic heat lamp for four hours is the perfect expression of NYC.  Suck on that, Nate.)  I've hit on what might be the perfect spinach-sausage topping method, so I'm going to leave that alone for a bit.  Future plans will be to try out some different toppings (anchovy and artichoke heart, anyone?), try one with fresh mozz, or perhaps try to do one like the inimitable Papa Del's in Champaign, IL (perhaps the best Chicago-style of all), and do the sausage in little balls, instead of the Lou Malnati's-inspired solid layer.  But for now, I'm going to stick with what's worked, at least until I get get the crust under control.  It doesn't do to start tinkering with too many variables at once.

For the crust, I am actually going to take a break from the Mariani crust and use a recipe (incorporating butter, which can't be a bad idea) sent to me by friend, former coworker and Chicago-based chef Eric Possa.  So we'll see how that goes.  Stay tuned.

-JS