Not Healthy: Chicago Deep Dish Pizza Crust

I haven't added recipes in a while because I've been swamped with work and keeping up with my other writing here but I need to do a better job of moving my recipes over here. I'm having a hard time keeping inventory of my bookmarks of recipes and particularly how I've modified the recipes for my own tastes. I'm going to make a concerted effort to try to update a recipe at least every week or two.

Today's recipe is a very simple recipe for Chicago-style deep dish pizza crust. Everybody has a different idea of what makes the best pizza and while I am not a huge fan of the windy city I love their pizza and their hot dogs. The crust is like a thick biscuit, offering a solid place mat for as much sauce, cheese and toppings as you can muster. I sought out a recipe to replicate Chicago pizza crust for a long time. It's hard to find a good recipe because there is a lot of disagreement on what is the magic ingredient that transforms the crust from regular ol' pizza crust into Chicago deep dish pizza crust. Personally I believe there are just several different techniques used in the city that all approximate the same final product. For me, this recipe gets the right result.

This recipe is designed to make two pizzas. I use it to make two pizzas in my 5.5 quart dutch oven, which will make pizzas roughly the size of a small, eight inch pizza. I shape them like normal pizzas rather than deep dish. The dough is very thick this way, which I like, but if you want a thinner and more crispy crust you could split this recipe into four and roll it out thinner.

Total prep and cook time: roughly 2.5 hours

Ingredients for Chicago Deep Dish Pizza Crust

• 3 1/4 cups all purpose flour
• 1/2 cup yellow cornmeal
• 2 tablespoons of yellow cornmeal
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 2 1/4 teaspoons rapid rise yeast
• 1 1/4 cups warm water
• 1/2 cup olive oil

Recipe for Chicago Deep Dish Pizza Crust

1. Mix 1/4 cup warm water with yeast, sugar and 1/4 cup flour in a small bowl. Let the yeast bloom for 15-20 minutes. 
2. Mix all remaining ingredients, except the two tablespoons of yellow cornmeal, with yeast mixture. Can mix by hand or with a stand mixer with a dough hook. Mix until texture is smooth and firm. Should be slightly slick from the oil but not wet. Form into ball and cover. Let rise for 1.5-2 hours.
3. Punch down dough and cut in half. Roll out each half. Sprinkle one tablespoon of cornmeal on baking surface before laying down pizza dough.
4. Assemble pizza and bake.

Tips for Chicago Deep Dish Pizza Crust

Typically you will bake pizza at 450F for 10-15 minutes. This dough already has a lot of oil in it and that will make the dough take longer to cook than more bready dough recipes. If you like to pile the cheese on heavy on your pizza expect to bake it for 25-30 minutes. That is also true if you add a lot of meat as a topping. The oil from the cheese (and grease from the meat) will soak into the dough as it bakes and it will take longer for the crust to bake all the way through. If you use a lot of sauce, particularly a very liquid sauce, that will also soak into the dough, so that is something to consider with your cook time. The good news is that if you pull the dough too earlier and cut into it to find undercooked crust, you can put the pizza back in the oven without harm. Unlike bread, which is ruined if you cut into it before it is fully cooked, a pizza crust will be fine. An easy test for whether the crust is cooked through is whether the cheese on the top is starting to brown. If the cheese isn't browned then the crust isn't cooked through, either.

This crust recipe is very forgiving about how it is cooked. If you have a pizza stone I am confident this recipe would work well on it. I like using my aluminum dutch oven (without the lid). I could make deep dish pizza with it but as I said above I just make regular flat crust pizza with it. The thicker metal helps get a crisp layer of crust on the bottom without burning. In my opinion that's the key to baking a good pizza. Crisp crust plus that nice browning on the top. You could also cook this pizza on a baking sheet or pizza pan but as somebody who, as a kid, ate a lot of frozen pizzas cooked on them, I always found it was too easy to burn the bottom before you get the top nicely cooked. I have tried this recipe on a baking sheet and while it wasn't as crispy as the dutch oven it wasn't burnt on the bottom and still turned out really well.

I mentioned above that you could turn this recipe into four pizzas by rolling out the dough thinner. I would warn you that rolling this dough too thin could turn it into a cracker-like crust. It gets very crispy and dense when it's thick so I could imagine it would turn into something akin to a cracker if it was rolled too thin. If you want to make smaller pizzas I'd suggest not going too small (perhaps four 4-5 inch pizzas) or opting for a different recipe that isn't loaded with fat-filled oil.