The 4 keys to make perfect CHICAGO DEEP DISH pizza every time

Hey, what's up? A lot of people ask the question, is it even pizza? Hell yes, this is a pizza, and a really dope one when it's made properly. Today, we're gonna be getting into the colossus of crust, the Chicago-style deep dish pizza. I'm gonna be talking into the how and the why this whole thing works. So if that sounds like fun, stick around. Let's get started. So, as some of you guys might know, I'm from Chicago. I grew up in the suburbs, and I lived in the city for about eight years, and during that time, I was able to eat at just about every classic, well-respected deep dish spot, like Giordano's, Malnati's, Pequod's, Chicago's. They're all really dope, but they're all pretty different. So what's the thing that unites all these pizzas and makes really great deep dish? For me, after making a lot of test pies for this video, I think it comes down to four things. Number one, a really tender, flaky cornmeal butter crust. Number two, a chunky cooked pizza sauce. As some of you guys know, I'm not a huge fan of the added complexity of cooking a pizza sauce, but when you're making a literal pizza pie, you need to concentrate things a little bit, and I'm gonna get into that a little bit more later on. Number three, fresh, hot Italian sausage. If you're in the pizzeria, you can get whatever you want on the pizza. Comes in all shapes and sizes, but if you want the real deal Mike Dicca, Da Bulse, Ashlyn and Clark-style pizza, you gotta have Italian sausage and a lot of it. Today, we're gonna be making our own, and it's gonna totally slap. And number four, full-fat, slightly-aged mozzarella. We're looking for a product that's almost golden in color. This is gonna give us a superior stretch, and it's also gonna give us a funky, rich milk flavor that's really memorable. Oh, and one more, maybe like a number five, which is you really gotta bake this thing hard, and it's gotta be almost fried in its pan. You gotta put a lot of oil on the outside to get that signature deep-dish style. So that's the setup. If you've got all that stuff going on, then in my mind, you've got a perfect deep-dish pizza that anybody who's cool will like. Let's get right into the process here, though. Let's get started by grabbing a food processor. Into that, we're gonna measure 450 grams all-purpose flour, 15 grams of salt, 40 grams of cornmeal. Mine's a little bit more coarse here, and I think that's probably the best way to go. On top of that, we're gonna add 12 grams of sugar, and nine grams of dry active yeast. I'm gonna pop the top on this thing, and then chop in 110 grams of cold butter that I've cut into smaller chunks. This is the same method I use for the Chicago-style suburban thin-crust pizza, and I really liked how flaky and tender the final dough is. We're gonna take this until the butter is broken down, and the whole thing looks kinda pebbly, just like this. In the R&D part of this, I tried two other methods of getting the butter into the dough, including lamination, like a croissant, but both gave me a really toothsome, overworked crust that wasn't really classic Chicago style. After the butter's all chopped in while the food processor is still running, we're gonna stream in 275 grams of warm-ish water, like 85 degrees specifically. That's gonna take about 15 seconds to fully come together, and once that's all spun up, we're gonna run it for about five or six more seconds, and there. I love how this dough looks. The butter gives it a satiny shine, and the cornmeal gives it a sick, golden color that you just don't see very often. I'm gonna flip this out into a medium stainless steel bowl, wrap it with plastic, and then set a 90-minute timer. While that dough is rising, we're gonna prep out this pizza sauce. To get started there, we're gonna grab a quarter of an onion, clean it up, and then grab a box grater. On the largest whole side, we're gonna grate this whole thing down. Breaking it down really far like this helps the onion melt into the background of the sauce a little bit easier, and even though we want a relatively chunky sauce, we really don't wanna be eating chunks of onion. Next, we're gonna grab two garlic cloves and just run that through the garlic press. I'm gonna throw that on top of my onions, and to actually cook this sauce, we're gonna go over and preheat a 10-inch saute pan over medium heat. Once that's hot, I'm gonna throw in about two tablespoons of butter. Chicago gets really cold in the winter, and having a lot of full-fat dairy really helps meat stick to the bones. Once that butter's melted, we're gonna throw in the onion, garlic, and five grams of salt. I'm gonna stir things up and let them saute for about two to three minutes over medium heat, or until things are softened and just starting to take on some color. At that point, I'm gonna add in about 40 grams of tomato paste, and we're gonna fry that off for just a second and bloom it up. This helps curb some of that stale, ketchup-y, metallic taste that I associate with tomato paste. Next, I'm gonna add in one 28-ounce can of high-quality crushed tomatoes. These are a California brand that I get at Whole Foods that I really like. It's about $4 a can, that's kind of expensive, but the quality here makes a significant difference in my opinion. I'm gonna follow those tomatoes with 10 grams of sugar and one gram each of dried basil and dried oregano. Okay, I'm gonna turn the heat down on this sauce now and let it simmer on low for about 20 minutes. After that 20 minutes, things are looking concentrated and slightly more intense and dark. At this point, we're gonna give it a taste. It should be almost like marinara sauce for breadsticks at Pizza Hut. That means it should taste very good. Okay, I'm really happy with this sauce. We're gonna cool this off and throw it in the fridge and I'm gonna grab one pound of fatty ground pork to make some sausage. I'm gonna cut this open and flip it over into my medium stainless steel bowl. You may have noticed that I use this bowl pretty much in every episode here and that's because I love it. It's one of my all-time favorite pieces of gear. It's really easy to clean. It's the perfect size for my scale of cooking. I'll throw a link down in the description if you're interested. Okay, into that pork bowl, we're gonna measure seven grams of salt, one gram of black pepper, three grams of paprika, one gram of chili flake, one gram of dried sage, one gram of garlic powder, five grams of sugar. That's clearly not five grams of sugar. That's way too much sugar. Apparently I'm trying to make candied pizza. To finish this off, we're gonna add two grams of toasted and crushed fennel seed and five grams of red wine vinegar. The move here now is to just mix everything up. I like to use a glove for that because cold, wet meat is kind of a buzzkill when you're using camera gear so this glove makes things a little bit easier. After a minute or so of kneading this meat to combine, we've got a really delicious, sweet, and spicy Italian sausage. But the only way I can know that for sure is if I cook a little piece off and have a little snack. So we're gonna head over to the stove. I'm gonna heat a medium saute pan and throw in about an ounce of sausage to taste. I'm just gonna sear it for about one minute per side and then we're gonna give it a bite. Tastes really good and it was really easy to make. This recipe's gonna make more sausage than you need. I like to freeze the rest here for later use in stuff like bolognese or ragu or whatever. The last major item on the prep list here is grating the mozzarella. This golden, full-fat mozzarella has a much better texture and flavor than your run-of-the-mill part skim that you find at most grocery stores. The move for this cheese is just a standard grate on the biggest holes of the box grater. We're gonna use about 10 to 12 ounces per pizza all day and this is a two pizza recipe so that would be about 24 ounces of grated cheese total. Once it's all broken down, we're gonna scoop it up and throw it into the fridge with the sausage and the pizza sauce and let that all hang out while we get our dough sorted out. Speaking of that, after one and a half hours, the dough has roughly doubled and it looks buoyant and alive. When I poke this dough, it's gonna indent, hold it for a second, and then slightly bounce back. I'm gonna lightly flour my cutting board and then the dough and then I'm gonna lightly flip it out. We're gonna cut this into two roughly equal pieces and then pre-shape them a bit by folding things and tucking them into a very rough round ball. We really wanna maintain as much tender flakiness as possible so a simple tuck and fold here is all we need. Once those are shaped, we're gonna grab a half sheet tray and hit them with a few glugs of olive oil. After that, we're gonna move these dough balls over to that sheet tray and then we're gonna cover the whole thing with another sheet tray and we're gonna let it do its final rise in the fridge. That's gonna be for about one hour. This cold final rise helps cool and reset the butter in the crust. That's gonna give us a much more pie-like flaky and puffy texture in the oven. After that one hour, the doughs have grown by about 50 to 75% and they're looking golden and satiny and just really pretty in my opinion. Okay, to get to business here, we have two options for baking these pies. Number one and my preferred choice is a nine to 10 inch cast iron pan. The heat transfer here is amazing and the crust gets really well fried and browned so the other option here would be a nine inch springform pan or just a regular size cake pan in general and it will definitely still work but the crust might be slightly less crisp so it's up to you. Today, the B-boy chooses cast iron but settle that aside for now and lightly flour your cutting board. Grab a dough ball and then hit that with a little bit of flour as well. Using a rolling pin, I'm gonna gently roll this thing out a bit and then I'm gonna flip it over and turn it 90 degrees. This helps keep things even and round. Of course, if it's sticking, we're gonna hit it with a little bit more flour and continue to roll things out until it's about 12 inches or so. This is really where it starts to look comically like a pie crust by the way. Once we're at about 12 inches round, we're gonna grab our cast iron and make sure it's about one and a half inches wider on each side. That's looking good. Next, I'm gonna flour the dough and then gently roll it up onto the rolling pin just to move it off to the side for a second. I'm gonna grab the cast iron and we're gonna hit that with a generous two to three tablespoons of olive oil. Yes, this seems like a lot, but one of the secrets to making a perfect deep dish is the fried dough. So really get in there and spread it all around. I'm gonna move the dough over to the pan and try and roll this thing off gracefully. Nope. Once we've got it in there, we're just pushing and forming this thing into the sides and corners. You want about one and a half to two inch deep pizza dough. And to get that, I just push it a bit further because things are gonna slide down and settle. Once you've got your cornmeal butter bomb pie crust laid out, it's time for us to build a pizza. I'm gonna grab my cheese, my sauce, the sausage, and a chunk of Parmesan from the fridge. Today, I'm making just one of these two pizza balls because I'm just one man and I'm not insane, but this recipe will easily feed three to four people. We're gonna start with the shredded mozzarella. This is the most iconic part of this pizza. The cheese goes down first and to a lot of people that seems really crazy, but it's necessary for this style. The cheese acts as a foundation for the toppings and the sauce. So spread about 10 to 12 ounces of that on there and kind of press the sides back up with it as needed. Behind that, we're gonna lay down the Italian sausage into about one half ounce chunks spread across this evenly. This might seem like a lot of sausage, but I assure you that in terms of Chicago standards, this is a moderate amount of sausage. Lou Malnati's is famous for making one with like two pounds of sausage on it. And that makes my stomach want to fall out of my butt. Behind the sausage, we're gonna do the sauce. After it's cooled down, it gets pretty thick, but that helps us out. It makes for an easier pizza build. But this thicker crushed tomato sauce is also a huge part of the structural integrity of this whole setup. To finish off this beast of a pizza, we're gonna add some grated Parmesan. For that, I like to go with the domestic stuff. We don't need to spend $20 a pound on the Italian Parmesan. And then finally, we're gonna hit with some chili flakes on top. Okay, this pizza in this pan weighs like eight pounds. I'm gonna load it into a preheated 425 degree oven and I'm gonna set a timer to check back after 25 minutes. This is just to make sure things are looking solid. Everyone's oven's a little bit different, but all day, this pizza should take about 35 to 40 minutes. After 35 minutes, things are looking really good. This pizza is an absolute monster. Oh my God. I'm gonna let that cool for about 10 to 15 minutes. Then we're gonna dish it up and eat this thing. Let's go in for a bite. Let's get a crust bite. What do you think? It's kind of crispy. It's got a little crispness. Cutting the butter in like we did right at the beginning gives us a really tender, really flaky crust. I tried this multiple ways. Like I mentioned earlier, I laminated it, wasn't good. This is the ultimate. I mean, truly, I'm stoked. Like this is a 10. This is a 10, dude. Thick sauce, homemade sausage, shredded full fat maz, cornmeal butter crust, baby. Don't mind if I double do. I'm trying to close this thing and I'm full. I'm like, that's how you know it's good. It's like you've got the Chicago pizza sweats. Okay. But let me know in the comments down below, what's your favorite Chicago style pizzeria? Is it Pequod's? Is it Malnati's, Giordano's? I think I'm a Giordano's boy. Could be controversial. A lot of people are. Say Malnati's. Malnati's. As always guys, thank you so much for your time and attention. Thank you for sticking around and we'll see you next time. All right, I think we got it. Okay. One more bite.