Chicago Tavern-Style Pizza Is Nothing Like Deep Dish

I'm gonna put some semolina on here first though, okay? A little semolina. Lots of semolina. A little more semolina. Here we go. Hey bakers, Martin here, and we're celebrating the summer of pizza as well as the book of pizza. Today, I wanna show you a Chicago tavern style pie from our Gosney oven. Let's make this. When most people think of Chicago, they think of the deep dish style. This is the opposite of that. If there were a continuum, which you have like deep dish on one side, at the very other end, you would have tavern style, and that's what we're gonna make today. Maximally thin, maximally crisp. Really one of my favorite pizzas in the book of pizza. Okay, so we're gonna start with this dough, and I'm gonna get some dry ingredients into the bowl. I have yeast here. It's a tiny quantity of yeast. A little bit of sugar and also some salt. And this dough is a little bit on the dry side, and so what I chose to do or what I found worked well in the development process for this was to combine those ingredients with the dough water and just stir to combine and let them sort of hydrate and dissolve while I get the rest of the dough components together. You know, the tavern style is different from every other style in the book. In this dough, we have some funny things. We have butter and we also have cornmeal. Quite different than your normal sort of Neapolitan style or even New York style, right? We're gonna roll this crust nice and thin, and then we're gonna dry it out overnight. It actually ages and dries. It's one of the things that contributes most greatly to the crispness of the dough. And now let's get our flour in the bowl. This is 160 grams of all-purpose flour. A lot of the pizzas in the book are obviously using bread flour. You know, there are lots of reasons for that. All-purpose also has a great place in pizza making as well, especially if we're looking for more tenderness, as is the case with the tavern style. And also contributing to tenderness is cornmeal. So cornmeal, non-glutenous, absolutely helping this dough to sort of be supple in a beautiful way. And when I was writing the recipe, I was thinking, well, what else can we do to really add tenderness to this dough? And another thing that we can do is to add a little bit of fat. And so I've got some butter in there. That is two tablespoons, 28 grams of butter. And then what I'm gonna do is, you know, not unlike the way that I would make a pie crust or other doughs which have a little bit of fat in them, I'm just gonna work it in with my fingers. It's cold butter. And I just work it in until it's well distributed. I'm not looking for large flakes like I might have with a biscuit or something like that. I'm breaking it all the way down and really just coating the flour with the fat. And what that does is it helps prevent the degree to which gluten can form. That fat gets in there and sort of interrupts the party. And what that's gonna do is it's gonna support a shorter eating experience. Shorter meaning tender, more friable. Okay, give this a little extra stir. Water into the bowl. And then just stir it up. This is one of the pizzas that when I was developing the recipe, nobody in my family had had Chicago Tavern style before. And so it was a process of sort of getting to know what was something new, but there was never a moment of like, eh, I'm not sure about this. I remember from the very first bite, people were very excited about it. Really, really good dough. Really good pizza. There isn't really any bulk on this dough, meaning the dough is not gonna have a first rise. I'm gonna go directly to dividing and rounding it. It's gonna rest for 30 minutes. And then I'm gonna come back and I'm gonna roll it to the size of the final pizza. I know that in many ways, that's different than anything that you've made, but just trust me. Divide the dough into two pieces, about 165, 166 grams each, somewhere right in there. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna round these up. I'll put them on a sheet tray with a little bit of flour on top of a piece of parchment. And they're gonna rest. And that cornmeal, which is a little bit coarse and does take a little bit of time to hydrate, that cornmeal is gonna absorb some of the water. When you come back, they're gonna be ready to roll out and we'll proceed to the next step in this great pizza. This is Chicago tavern style from the book of pizza. Okay, let's roll some tavern style dough. Okay, so these doughs have had half an hour, 45 minutes, somewhere in that timeframe. There's such a small amount of yeast that it doesn't really matter. You could leave these for an hour, you can leave them for a couple hours. It's not going to be impactful in terms of the final result or anything like that. For ease, I thought, let's just give it half an hour. That way, you know, you weren't stuck with this dough task for any longer than was necessary. So in that half an hour, these have had a chance for the flour and cornmeal to hydrate. They gained a little bit of strength, a little bit of extensibility. And now we can proceed to the next step, which is rolling them. One of the nice things about this dough is that you're going to get the shaping process out of the way right now. So right now we're going to give the final shape and then we're going to cure these doughs to dry them out a little bit before baking on day two or three or whatever it is. So we're going to roll them out 13 inches in diameter and I'm using quite a bit of bench flour. I'm using quite a bit of bench flour here. It's easier to be a little bit heavier here as opposed to being too light and having doughs which maybe stick to the counter or something. So generously floured. And I sort of work it on each axis. So I sort of go north-south as it were, and then I invert it and also rotate it a little bit and then go again. At least I start them that way. After a little bit, I might just sort of leave it in place and then work around the dough mass. The reason to keep inverting it though is that it keeps you on top of making sure that the dough isn't going to stick to the counter. So by inverting it, it's almost like a built-in check to make sure that I'm not getting any sticky spots. So invert it, adjust it. You're thinking round the whole time. Just keep thinking round, round, round, round, and you will end up round. And if you see yourself getting out of round in a spot, just go give that area a little bit of love and it will sort itself out and you'll end up with beautifully round doughs. We're going to 13 inches. I did 13 because of two things. One, it's like the largest size we can do for the home oven. And two, it's the size which fits on a good piece of parchment paper. Good parchment is generally, for the home, not wider than 13 inches. And so I went kind of as big as I could. So beautiful dough, rolled out, nice and round, 13 inches. I'm gonna plop it onto my parchment. And if you're a little big, it will retract some. Just make your little adjustments there. And I'll continue with my second one. So I'll take a minute. I'll roll this one out and then I'll come back. You can put this on a half sheet tray. And I think it's better if you actually invert the half sheet tray. Let me show you what I mean. If you put it inside the sheet tray, sometimes the edges might fold up a little bit. And because it's gonna dry out, you might end up with a sort of permanently rounded corner. So what I recommend that you do is you actually put it on the tray, which is inverted, like that. And that will be totally fine. Let them sit like that. You're gonna put them into the fridge, loosely covered, for eight to 12 hours. And what I mean by loosely covered is, often I'll put a second sheet of parchment on top, just as insurance to make sure that, depending on the season and how robust your refrigerator is, it might take more moisture off this dough than you want to. We want them to dry and feel leathery, so still pliable, but not sort of breakable, as it were. We want them to still have some pliable quality to them. You could take a piece of maybe cling film or something like that and just put it over, but don't do so in a way that it won't lose moisture. We want these to lose about 10% of their total moisture during the eight to 12 hour period. If you don't plan on using them before then, what I'd recommend is that, after that sort of overnight rest in the fridge, loosely covered, put something else on top of them, maybe a little bit of a lid or something like that, just to keep them from drying out too much and getting too fragile in the drying process. So, eight to 12 hours. We're gonna bake these outside, so the next time we see you, we'll be standing at our Gosney. It'll be nice and hot, and we'll be ready to bake our Chicago tavern-style pizzas. Welcome to our outdoor space here today, outside our headquarters here in Wilder, Vermont. Let's make some pizza. Before I jump into loading our Chicago tavern-style dough, though, I wanna give you a couple of tips on how I have this oven set up or how I'm going to use it. In broad terms, when I think of using the outdoor tabletop oven, I think of the heat in zones, not so much as temperatures. Because these ovens tend to move around a little bit in terms of their heat, I think it's easier to think of it in terms of zones, and what I mean by that is that I'll have a low zone, a medium zone, and a high zone that I will use for different styles of pizza. Because I have this lower, slower bake today with our Chicago tavern-style, I'm gonna aim for the low zone, which is 550 to 650 degrees Fahrenheit. In the book of pizza, we have a full sort of read-through of how it is that I approach those zones, including styles of doughs and examples and all that stuff. We even have a QR code down here that you can click on that takes you to a link where I give some additional information on how to use this oven. But the summary is that I want you to think of it in low, medium, and high zones. Today, because I have a bake that I want to be in the seven to 10-minute range, I'm in the low zone, which is perfect for our Chicago tavern-style dough. Okay, so the oven's set up. It's not too hot. Let's get our dough topped, and let's get some pizzas baking. So this is the dough that I mixed and then rolled out yesterday, and we dried it overnight. You can see that it's kind of leathery, right? It's got this leathery, pliable but dry aspect. Overnight, these doughs are gonna lose at least 10% of their moisture and water weight, and that helps us to get closer to crisp. So it's almost like we pre-crisp in a way, or pre-dry. I put a little bit of semolina on my peel. And one of the beauties about this type of dough is that it's really like pizza with training wheels on because of the fact that it's dried out a little bit, it means that it's very resistant to sticking. As a small amount of insurance, I added some semolina. I'm not sure it's even really necessary, honestly. One additional benefit of these doughs is that they can hang out in the fridge for a while. If you let them get too dry, they will become sort of like, they will crack. They will actually crack, so you do wanna cover them after that initial eight to 10, whatever, 12 hours. But then when you go to use them, in the event that they've sort of like softened up too much, just uncover them, let them dry out a little bit at room temperature, and you'll be good to go. Anyway, okay, so you can see I've got this beautiful dough. It's slightly dried out. It's ready for topping. And the oven is preheated. Let my oven preheat for a solid 30 minutes or so. Different ovens will vary in the amount of time that they take to preheat. But make sure you let it preheat fully. And one more time, just to talk about how much heat you need. I like to heat my oven up to pretty hot, up into, say, the medium zone, you know, 750 to 850, and then I let it fall. I want to load these pizzas when the hearth reads, you know, I would say between 550 and 600 degrees, somewhere around there. In the home oven, when you're baking these, I say 500 degrees because that's about as hot as anybody's oven can get. This isn't a pizza where you want to bake it in two or three minutes. And the reason for that is that if you bake it that quickly, you don't get quite the sort of moisture loss that I want for this to be really crisp. So it's a long bake, seven to 10 minutes. And if you find that it's moving too quickly in your outdoor tabletop oven, turn your heat down. Let the oven cool off a little bit and then proceed. Sauce all the way to the edge. We're gonna put the amounts down there in the comments so that you can follow those. But you can also measure with your heart. You can sort of see how much I have here or how much I don't. It's even coverage, but it's not heavy sauce. You put a bunch of sauce on there and you're gonna end up with less crispness. So, you know, be judicious. Little bit of low moisture mozzarella. And, you know, we're trying to do a little bit of Chicago vibe here today. And so we're doing Italian sausage with giardiniera and a little bit of oregano. I think of that topping combination as sort of being owned by Chicago. And the sausage, yes, it's raw. I'm putting raw sausage on the pizza. And with this amount of cook, there's plenty of time for this sausage to do its thing. No big deal. If you're not a sausage person, put something plant-based on here or just skip it. Cheese with giardiniera, that'd be pretty good. The approach to the toppings on the Chicago tavern style is heavy. You could even say maximal. Yeah, Chicago doesn't seem to do anything halfway. You know, if you think about like the deep dish uno style, I mean, that is a maximal, chonky, you know, brick of a pizza. This is thin crust, but still kind of a maximal treatment with the toppings, in my opinion. Everybody should have a piece of sausage with every bite. So get it up there, do your jiggle, make sure that the pizza isn't in here. And then we're gonna get it over here and get it in. Now, what are the things that I need to think about when I go to load? One of the things that I'm gonna think about is how much time is this pizza in the oven? The reason that I'm gathering that information is not so much to support this pizza, but it's to support the pizzas that come after this one. So if I have a sense of what to expect in terms of timings, or if the pizza is super dark and we're only two minutes in, I might wanna make some adjustments to the oven. So quantify what you have going on in terms of timings, right, the amount of time it's in the oven. So I'm gonna slide this in, and I'm kind of gonna try to stay to the right a little bit away from the flame. And after I get it in there, I'm gonna turn the oven off so that I give the bottom of the pizza plenty of time to bake before I start to add color to the top, because if the top gets too dark too soon, it's kind of game over. I'm gonna have to come out, right? And so I'm gonna load the pizza, and then I'm gonna turn the oven off. So usually within the first, I don't know, minute or so, the curious part of me is going to grab one of my peels. I'm gonna go in here, and I'm just gonna lift and see. It's already taking color, but it's not burning, which makes me happy. At some point in this process, probably maybe three or four minutes in, depending on how it looks, what I can see, right, depending on how it looks, I will go in and rotate it, right, I'm gonna do some sort of rotation because the fact of the matter is that the left side is hotter than the right side, and you wanna make sure that you get an even baking, so I'm gonna try and rotate. This is the part of working with a tabletop oven, which is really cooking more than baking, right? Baking is set a timer and come back in 15 minutes to check, right? This is watch the timer, but also more importantly, watch the pizza. Let's pull it out and just see. So on the left side, darkening, right side's still a little bit blonde, so I'm gonna just rotate it and go back in. Such a pretty little pizza. I really like it when they're like perfectly round, you know, that makes me very satisfying, as my kids would say, when everything just sort of lines up. Six and a half, okay, let's have a look here. So I think that looks good. I want a little bit more top color though, and so now I'm gonna put it back in, I'm gonna turn the oven back on, whoop, and I'm gonna turn the flame down, I'm not trying to make a Neapolitan here, just give it a little bit more color, and I'm just looking for some dark spots to appear on the cheese a little bit. Beautiful, okay, let's get this thing out. So, got this gorgeous color around the edge, I know the bottom's done, the cheese is melted, but I got this one a little bit earlier and the cheese didn't totally split, it looks beautiful. I'm gonna get it onto my cooling rack and let it set up for a minute. In between pizzas, and this is important, you wanna give that stone a chance to recover a little bit, right? And so, I'm gonna go back, medium is okay, low is okay, somewhere in that range. If you're working with an outdoors tabletop oven, I think you need an infrared. I love having this information, but I'm happier and more comfortable if I have two pieces of information, largely the surface temp of the stone, and then if you can get a probe temp, that's helpful as well, and having those two metrics will help you make even better pizza. We'll let this cool for just a minute. Does that look delicious? This is cool for a second, let's get it garnished. Okay, first things first, a little bit of giardiniera. There is actually a recipe for a very good one in the book. I didn't have time to make it, so we're out of a jar today, and there's no shame in that. So, a little bit of giardiniera, a little bit of parm to taste, and some of this beautiful oregano, if it all doesn't blow away. Okay, beauty, let's get it cut. One of the hallmarks of this style is these little bites. It's almost like these little bite-sized pieces, right? It's meant to be eaten sitting in a bar or a tavern. Having a piece of this and having a sip and having a piece of this and having a sip, the whole idea was that if they serve these pizzas that are salty, you're gonna need something cold to drink with it, and they sold a lot more beer. One of the things I like about this is how tender it is. Cornmeal in the dough, also butter in the dough instead of oil, both of those things contributing to this sort of short, almost pastry-like aspect to it. Delicious Chicago tavern-style pizza.