So I've been meaning to get around to learning to make Chicago-style deep dish pizza. I even had friend and commenter ChristyP , who I guess had to learn to make it as a condition for staying married to her husband or something, email me a recipe for crust, like, ages ago, and it has been sitting around waiting for me to pick it up and learn a new crust technique all that time.
This is not the story of how I took ChristyP's recipe and learned to make the authentic Chicago-style crust. This is the story of how I was leafing through my mother-in-law's back issues of Family Circle and saw a recipe that used ordinary frozen pizza dough and thought to myself, "That picture looks pretty good, and I can do better than the frozen pizza dough. And I won't have to learn how to do anything new, which is good, because I've been putting off the authentic Chicago-style crust because I don't have time to innovate these days."
Here's the story.
So, there I was, leafing through my mother-in-law's back issues of Family Circle, and I saw a recipe that used ordinary frozen pizza dough and thought to myself, "That picture looks pretty good, and I can do better than the frozen pizza dough…"
…okay, you get the picture.
Anyway, I figured that if refrigerated pizza dough would work, so would the usual dough that comes out of my bread machine. So I made a pound of 50%-whole-wheat pizza dough and proceeded with something that was kind of like the Family Circle vegetable-pepperoni deep dish pizza, only I substituted the vegetables with a mix I thought would go better around here (eggplant isn't super popular), and I said "to hell with reduced-fat cheese and turkey pepperoni.")
Also, since I don't own a deep dish pizza pan, I used my 10" springform pan, which has straight sides and so isn't perfect for the job, but it worked fine once I got everything inside it.
Cheater's deep-springform-pan vegetable-non-turkey-pepperoni pizza
- About six ounces button mushrooms, chopped medium-fine (around here, mushrooms can't be in big visible pieces)
- 3 small-to-medium zucchini, sliced in half-moons
- Half a red onion, chopped
- One big red bell pepper, chopped
- One cup of any tomato sauce — I used leftover homemade spaghetti sauce that I'd cooked meatballs in
- 1 and 1/2 cups shredded asiago-parmesan mix from a bag (it was on sale last week — use any combination of shredded cheese, I would think, but make sure that a significant fraction is parmesan)
- Two ounces of pepperoni, chopped fairly finely. Probably Genoa salami or sausage or bacon would be good instead. I liked the pepperoni and we always have it on hand for kid pizza.
- One tomato or maybe three roma tomatoes — whichever looks better this time of winter — thinly sliced
- 2 tsp dried oregano and maybe some basil
- Salt and pepper
- Olive oil for the pans
- One pound of pizza dough*
Preheat the oven to 450°F. Brush a rimmed baking sheet with olive oil and scatter the mushrooms, zucchini, onion, and bell pepper on it; sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast at 450°F for about 20-30 minutes, stirring once.
Brush a deep 10-inch pan (like a cake pan, for instance; I used my springform) generously with olive oil. Roll the pizza dough out into a circle wide enough to go into the pan and up the sides most of the way. It doesn't have to splay over the top edge of the pan unless the pan isn't super-deep. Then put it there. (With a straight-sided pan it's a little tricky to get the dough to stay on the sides of the pan while you fill it, but I managed with some pinching and holding it out of the way).
Layer about a third to a half of the cheese on the bottom of the crust, followed by the roasted vegetables, followed by the cup of tomato sauce, followed by the diced pepperoni. Make sure the crust extends at least a half inch above the toppings so it doesn't overflow into your pan; if not, pinch and stretch it as you fill. It's okay if the crust folds back down over the toppings on the edge. Bake 15 minutes at 450°F.
(At this point the crust edges looked sufficiently brown to me, so I made a little ring of aluminum foil to go around the edge of the pizza and protect the crust. Then I proceeded:)
Top the pizza with the remaining cheese, the slices of tomato, and a sprinkling of oregano and basil. Return to the oven for 15 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to stand for 5-10 minutes before cutting.
Full disclosure: Three of my kids wouldn't touch the stuff. They got peanut butter sandwiches.
Fuller disclosure: I'm not sorry, as the rest of us ate the whole thing. What I liked about it, compared to a regular flat pizza, was that we got a much higher ratio of vegetables to bread than usual. And it was really beautiful coming out of the oven. Smelled great. And it seemed easier than normal pizza — probably because I could fit all the pizza we were going to eat in the oven at the same time, instead of having to do it in thirds one pizza at a time. I did the vegetable chopping ahead of time, and the bread machine made my pizza dough, and the vegetables roasted in the time it took for me to get the deep pan prepared and the dough rolled out and a fruit salad made. Definitely a fine pizza for a weeknight. Families much larger or less picky than mine will have to make two.
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*Make your own or buy it. One pound means you start with about two cups of flour. Here's the bread machine pizza dough recipe I used. Usually I put some olive oil in, maybe 1 Tbsp, but this time I forgot to. Worked fine anyway.
- 3/4 cup water
- 1 Tbsp honey
- 1 cup Dakota Maid whole wheat flour (something you would actually use to bake 100% whole wheat bread)
- 1 cup bread flour
- 1 heaping tsp salt
- 1 and 1/4 tsp yeast
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