Deep dish pizza

After the first slice you are full, and you should be. You’ve eaten roughly three pounds of food that is baked on top of a crispy, cake-like crust. There is never a reason to eat more than one slice of deep dish, but you forge on." Jim Gaffigan

One last thing from Jamie's book on America - deep-pan pizza, which, curiously he features in his chapter on New York. Now I have no doubt that you can find deep-dish pizza in New York, but it's a Chicago thing. Although having read Jamie, and researched his recipe a bit, I now find that there is a Chicago version and a Detroit version.

The picture at left is another coincidence thing, because recently Felicity Cloake, who has just released a book on American food, after a bicycle trip around the States, talked about deep dish pizza somewhere - which I now can't find. But I did find this picture on Instagram which she took at one of the iconic deep-dish pizza restaurants, Malnati's in Chicago, which is where she had her first taste of this very different kind of pizza to the thin Neopolitan Margherita kind.

I first tasted a deep dish pizza in Waikiki, Hawaii, many years ago during the last holiday we had with our children, when they were children - well only just. I think they were 16 and 14 at the time and picky eaters of course. And so we went to a Chicago pizza place and discovered deep-dish pizza. It was probably a chain pizza place, but we loved it and went back for a second visit. Mind you I think it had cheese on top - which is not the Chicago thing - I will come to that. But it was definitely deep dish. The picture above is from Giordano's in Chicago itself, and so, like my opening picture it is presumably the real deal. Serious Eats listed it at the top of it's favourite deep-pan pizza places in Chicago.

According to Wikipedia the history goes back to 1943:

"Chicago-style deep-dish pizza was invented at Pizzeria Uno in Chicago, founded by Ike Sewell and Richard Riccardo in 1943 Riccardo's original recipe for a pizza cooked in a pie pan or cake tin was published in 1945 and included a dough made with scalded milk, butter, and sugar.  The restaurant's cook Alice Mae Redmond later adjusted the recipe to be made with water and olive oil and a "secret dough conditioner" to make it stretch better." Wikipedia

There are a few differences between Detroit and Chicago pizza - best explained in an article on the Patio and Pizza website. I think the main ones are the dish, the dough and the tomato sauce. Having now reread the article I am clear about some things, not others. Different cheese - Mozzarella for Chicago and a mix of Wisconsin brick cheese - looks like a kind of soft cheddar -and provolone. Different tomato sauce - chunky for the Chicago version and smoother and thick for Detroit. As to the pastry - I think the Detroit one is crustier and the Chicago more doughy, but I'm a bit confused about the ingredients. Butter and polenta or semolina are mentioned but I'm not sure for which one. Finally there is the tin - a round cake pan for Chicago, and a flatter rectangular pan for Detroit. Jamie explains why the Detroit version is in a flat pan:

"Until recently I'd always seen this type of pizza as a slightly greedy way of bulking out crusts and toppings. I hadn't realized Italian immigrants had cleverly adapted their old-world recipes to suit new world coal-fired ovens. Making pizzas in tins to protect the base from the soot of the oven makes perfect sense to me now, and I can honestly say that when it's cooked and seasoned with proper love and care, I'm more than happy with this representative of the pizza family." Jamie Oliver

Mind you when he comes to make his own version of Deep-pan pizza, in the way of most of the recipes in his America book, he actually does his own thing. Here is his version - it's round for a start, the pastry is a basically normal pizza dough, and he has several toppings. He also uses the conventional layering technique of a pizza - sauce on the bottom, toppings, with cheese on top. Really all he has done is given us a thicker layer of dough and baked it in a deep pan. A hybrid.

Which is not to say that it wouldn't be delicious. It's just not either Detroit or Chicago deep-dish pizza.

So first the Detroit version, as Jamie did sort of tell us the origin story for Detroit. J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats - in a very, very long, and almost scientific explanation of the subtleties of Detroit-style pan pizza tells us a little more about the origins:

"Rectangular pan pizzas have been served in the Motor City since at least 1946, when, according to PMQ Pizza Media, bar owner Gus Guerra and his wife, Anna, decided to throw a batch of her mother's Sicilian dough into a blue steel pan, originally used to carry auto parts, and bake it with cheese and sauce. The pizza emerged with a blackened, lacy, crispy cheese crust all the way around the edges, and a new pizza style was born."

The crispy cheese crust, he explains is formed when the cheese oozes out from the centre. And as you can see the toppings are sparse.

When it comes to the Chicago version I am still confused about the layering and the toppings. It would seem that the cheese is on the bottom - to prevent any sogginess in the crust, and then you put the tomato sauce on top. Then there are toppings, which according to Patio and Pizza can be lavish and varied, and yet when you see photos of 'authentic' produced in Chicago versions, as at the top of the page, there are no toppings, and also in this Chicago-style deep dish pizza from Sally's Baking Addiction, which I have to say looked pretty good and had a very tempting sounding kind of pastry base. Butter was definitely involved I think. It almost sounded like puff pastry.

I'm pretty sure that the version we had in Hawaii all those years ago, when my now 50 something children were teenagers, had toppings. In fact there were a range of different toppings, just like you would find in a normal pizza restaurant.

With her Deep dish tomato and mozzarella pizza Food 52's Erin Jeanne McDowell, like Jamie, but in a different way, has a sort of hybrid version. Rectangular tray, a blended tomato sauce on the bottom, then cheese, then a thicker layer of tomato sauce on top. The cheese is mozarella, which is Chicago, the tray is Detroit, as is the sauce.

The reason for the cheese being beneath the tomato sauce rather than on top, by the way, is because the deepness of the pizza means that it takes longer to cook, and therefore the cheese might burn if it was on top. It also provides a surprise, and different taste if it is just left to melt in the middle, rather than crisp on the top.

According to J. Kenji López-Alt, the Detroit version has become a 'thing' which is perhaps why Jamie referenced it in his book. 'Things' seem to happen in the large centres like New York after all.

Maybe when the family are here again I'll have a go at the Sally's Baking Addiction version.

YEARS GONE BY

July 2

2024 - My kitchen bit by bit - 1

2023 - Nothing

2022 - Nothing

2021 - So - to Delia

2020 - Nothing

2019 - Cooking with the grandchildren

2018 - Nothing

2017 - Nothing