Deep Dish Pizza Quest Part 5: The Nate Episode

 Hi everyone!  As you know, my partner and cohost, Jesse, has been trying to convince me for the longest time that Chicago-style 'pizza' is, in fact, pizza.  I mean, it's not.  But he really seems to think it is.  Eventually, after days of debate, I finally got him to concede that it wasn't pizza, it was pizza casserole.  A moral victory, but I feel like he was just saying what he had to say to get me off his case at the time.

Fast forward years later, and the knucklehead finally put so much effort into a recipe that I just had to try the damn thing.  Made if for a kitchen full of hungry roughnecks, and the results were... well received.  Goddamnit.  I gotta hand it to the guy, it tasted pretty good.  I mean, I hate it, it's not pizza, but it was... pretty good.  I'll give him that.  Just like his Chicago Cubs gave my Mets Javier Baez.  Isn't that right, Jesse?

{I will destroy you.  -js}

So anyway, all jokes aside, this 'pizza,' while failing the basic 'is-it-pizza?' test, actually tastes pretty great.  A few technical notes: first, I didn't have chopped tomatoes on hand, so I just used whole plum tomatoes, which I broke up a little bit and drained.  According to Jesse, that's still cool, various places uses various different tomato products as their topper.  Second, it got a little dark before it was all the way crispy on the bottom, so I pulled it a little early, but chalk that up to a first-time run through a complicated recipe.  {Also, my recipe was made in my home kitchen, using home gear.  It's only natural a restaurant oven may run a little hotter.  No worries there, and it's an easy fix for next time.}  No, Chi-Town, there's not gonna be a next time.  I made your casserole, I'm good.  And it was a fine casserole.  All it was missing was a little French onion soup mix.

We discuss this in detail on the July 13 episode of the podcast.  Here is a photo series I did of this delicious yet infuriating debacle.