[Photograph: Reddit] Someone on Reddit made a spaghetti-and-meatball deep dish pizza. I don't know what's come over me, but I really want a slice of this thing. Funny, too, because when you scroll through the pics from the original poster, you'll see s/he used DKM's Chicago-Style Deep Dish recipe from pizzamaking.com. I'm going to have to hunt for a good meatball recipe and try this myself. See also: Deep Dish Pizza à la Cook's Illustrated »...
Zachary's Pizza is an East Bay icon, specializing in stuffed pizza. The pan starts with a layer of dough, followed by a hefty layer of mozzarella and toppings. Another thin layer of dough is added on top of the cheese and goodies before the robust sauce covers it all. While the cheese is hearty and the sauce is rich, I found the crust at Zachary's to be a bit disappointing.
Little Star is known as the best place to get Chicago-style deep-dish pizza in San Francisco. The lines are notoriously long, and I was determined to find out if the pizza was worth the wait.
[Photographs: Adam Kuban] I've had the January/February 2010 issue of Cook's Illustrated sitting in my to-do stack of crap since it came out. In it, a recipe for deep dish pizza. (You can find that recipe here, though it's behind a paywall. Sorry! Oh, or try this website, which has it: http://thirtyaweek.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/deep-dish-pizza-recipe) With some free time last Saturday, I set about making the stuff. Above is one of my finished pies (the recipe makes two 9-inch-round pizzas). Since all the junk is in the proverbial trunk, i.e., you can't see nothin' but sauce, I'll tell you that this one...
During last week's poll, we had a number of folks point out that the query may as well have been a proxy vote on NYC-style vs. deep dish. (Though we respectfully disagree, because "not deep dish" does not automatically equal "NYC-style" — think of all the other non–deep dish, non–NYC styles out there.) Anyway, there seemed to be some sentiment for a poll to take on the question of how often Chicagoans eat deep dish. So: How often do order deep dish vs. thin crust? »
When our man Ed Levine wrote in his 2005 book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven that he thought of deep dish more as a casserole, he earned the ire of Chicagoans and almost needed a police escort when he appeared on a radio show in the Windy City to promote the book. But we've come a long way in terms of pizza appreciation since then. So, where do you stand? Deep dish: pizza or casserole? »
It brings me no joy to write this review. I, like many New Yorkers, have fond memories of Big Nick's, the venerable Upper West Side dive. Truth be told, I haven't been in there in about 20 years, but I warmly recall eating hearty portions for not very much money whilst stuffed into Big Nick's tight booths, surrounded by a thousand handwritten signs, with the banter of the colorful cast of characters who work and eat there providing much merriment. When I discovered that they serve a Chicago-style pie I decided to make a journey back to the UWS to check it out.
I was eating a dainty Neapolitan pizza with Adam Kuban recently when I lamented the fact that there's no Chicago deep dish pizza available in NYC (putting aside the few remaining branches of awful chain Uno Chicago Grill, which is actually headquartered in Boston). Adam mentioned that there is a place in Astoria that reportedly sells deep dish pies, but a few days later Time Outannounced that L'Asso is now selling a deep dish pie much closer to my Manhattan home.
Union Jack Pub is located in the Broad Ripple section of Indianapolis and is probably one of the last places you would expect to serve pizza. But they take the pizza seriously enough that they have a separate menu for it—it is printed on a pizza peel. The deep, deep dish pizza is the thing to get there.
[Photographs: pizzamaking.com] So this recipe thread on pizzamaking.com was originally started in 2005. I missed it back then but found it this morning while checking the Slice site stats. (Someone clicked through to Slice from a link in the discussion there.) This looks like a sort of fun way to make deep dish using a pan many people probably already have at home. (And, yeah, I know New York–based readers are probably howling at this. Deal.)...
