Authentic Chicago Deep Dish Pizza

Chicago deep dish breaks every rule of pizza, but it still tastes so good. We'll start by making our crust by adding some all-purpose flour, semolina, sugar, salt, and active dry yeast all into the bowl of a stand mixer. Then separately, we'll mix together some warm water, melted butter, and corn oil and give that a mix until fully combined. Now on goes our dough hook attachment and then over medium speed we'll pour in all of our wet mixture and let this go until a shaggy dough forms. Let the dough rest now for 10 minutes and then we'll mix again once more for just one to two minutes. We don't want to over knead because Because that'll develop too much gluten, making it a chewy crust, and we want something a little more similar to a pie crust. The final step here is to shape our dough into a ball, drop it in a bowl, then cover with plastic wrap and place it in the fridge for 24 to 48 hours. While our dough develops all its flavor, we'll make our sauce by combining some San Marzano tomatoes into a strainer over a bowl and then crushing these up by hand. You don't have to do it this way, but this is how I was taught in restaurants and I've done it the same way since. The goal here is to remove a good amount of the water from the tomatoes so we don't get a wet and soggy deep dish pizza. Add what's in the strainer to to a small pot over medium-low heat, along with some freshly grated garlic, a splash of olive oil, some dried oregano, a little sugar, and a pinch of salt. And once it comes to a boil, let it simmer for about 20 minutes until it looks something like this, much thicker and jammier. We'll let that cool while we prep our sausage. For this, I'm using Italian sausage. You can use spicy, you can use regular, whatever you want. And to it, I'm gonna add some extra fennel seeds, as well as a sprinkle of salt, and some freshly grated Parmesan cheese. If you've never seen how a deep dish pizza is assembled, I think you're gonna be really surprised. A while back, I got to film in Chicago at the most famous deep dish pizza place in the world. And I couldn't believe when I watched them put the whole thing together, especially when it came to how they pressed out the sausage. Once that's mixed up, we'll cut our mozzarella cheese into nice even slices. The same way we wanted to remove some of the moisture from our tomatoes, we want a low moisture mozzarella here so we don't get a soggy deep dish pizza. To assemble, we've got our rested dough, which I'm actually going to cut in half because we made enough dough for two pizzas here. Save that one for another time. Before adding our dough, we'll paint the whole baking dish with butter. This is another way we're sort of distinguishing this crust as more of a pie crust than a pizza crust. And once it's been fully coated on all sides, I'll add in my dough and then begin to Press. I don't want anyone to be confused by the fact that I just took this right from the fridge and I'm now pressing it cold into our pizza pan. With any other kind of pizza, you want the dough room temperature. It's so much easier to work with that way. But here, the dough has so much oil and butter that we actually need it to be cold. Once we've pressed our dough evenly and all the way up the sides of the pan, we can now begin the layering process by starting with our mozzarella cheese. Chicago-style deep dish pizza is layered opposite from a classic New York-style pizza. Feel free here to break off bits and pieces of cheese to make sure you've filled in the whole bottom layer. It's time for the sausage. This is where things get weird. The sausage is pressed to basically a giant sausage patty. You're not breaking off little pieces of it. You're making this huge disc that covers all the cheese underneath it. When I saw this the first time, I was extremely confused, but this is how they do it. I like to think of the sausage here as a protective layer. Deep dish pizza bakes for a long time. In a way, this sort of protects that whole layer of cheese from burning. Now we'll grate a thin layer of Parmesan cheese over that sausage. We're really building lots and lots of layers of flavor here as we keep adding. Tomato sauce evenly all across the top. Now I'm going to quickly clean off my crust here so I can brush that with butter or olive oil. This is something I always do with any pizza I make. It helps make the crust so much better. And finally, one last layer of parmesan cheese over the whole thing. Especially the edges and that crust. Some people say that's the best part. And now, we are ready to bake. Your oven rack here should be as low as possible to get that proper crust. And now we bake for 30 minutes. Because of how long the baking process is, if you feel your crust is browning too quickly, you can go ahead and make a little tent using aluminum foil. And that'll help to protect it. Once finally finished, you'll see right away that it's a bit jiggly. And that's why we need to give it a few minutes to set. Usually, when a recipe tells me to wait, I don't. But with deep dish pizza, you have no choice. Normally, I might eat it out of the pan, but for now, I'm gonna take it out so you can see exactly what I'm looking at. Now, you know how earlier I said that deep dish breaks every rule of pizza? Well, one of those rules is the fact that you eat it with a fork and knife. Feels so weird to eat pizza with a fork and knife, but I'm gonna do it that way just because I know that's how it's supposed to be done. Here's the thing, it's not a pizza. It's something different, it's its own thing. It's this perfect combination between a pie and a pizza, and I don't even know what else. What I do know is that it is delicious. Comment below what's better and why. Deep dish or New York style?