I have actually had real Chicago deep dish pizza. In Chicago. I kid you not it was pretty incredibly delicious. Take all your favourite pizza toppings and stack them on top of one another and you get deep-dish pizza. It's literally a pizza pie. Easy-peasy when done in a cast iron frying pan because you can fry all your ingredients, then just roll out the dough, layer the ingredients and pop the whole thing in the oven. You essentially need about 3 cups of pizza toppings total, but you can use any combination of your favourite ingredients. My brother is an apprentice butcher in Halifax and brought me some amazing bacon that just made this pizza into the legend it was meant to be. Here is what I did.
Ingredients:
1 batch of your favourite pizza dough recipe
1 cup pizza sauce
1 1/2 portobello mushroom cap, cubed
1 onion
1 cup back bacon, cubed (use locally made bacon if you can, it just tastes so much smokier, saltier and just baconier)
1 fresh tomato
1/2 cup old cheddar cheese
Directions:
First, prep your ingredients. Pre-cook the bacon in the pan, set aside, then brown the onions in the fat (don't let any of that good stuff go to waste), set them aside and throw in the portobello for a quick 5 min cooking.
Once that is done, let the pan cool while you grate cheese, chop any other veggies you want to use and roll out the dough. Make sure you use a little oil so it doesn't stick to the counter or the rolling pin.
Once its rolled out, gently lift the dough into the oiled pan and shape it as best you can. If the pan is warm it will help the dough to puff slightly.
I'm a little distracted by a little ball of cuteness tugging at my legs...
She's my girl.
Back to the pizza. Spread 1/2 cup of the sauce in the bottom of the pan.
Add a smattering of the mushrooms and onions...
Then the bacon. Lovely, lovely bacon.
I decided to make this a double-decker pizza with a bit of pizza dough I had leftover. Roll out a thin sheet of dough to add some dimension to your pizza pie. Pop in the oven for about 10 minutes just to cook it enough so that it's not doughy.
This is to show you that I added tomato before the second layer of dough. It is critical to the structural integrity of the deep-dish pizza. Not really, it just tastes good.
Splatter on the rest of the sauce, then the rest of the ingredients. Don't forget the cheese just because I forgot to take a picture with the cheese! Then pop the whole thing in the 350 oven for about 20 mins.
While the pizza is cooking, go play outside. Like we did.
Be sure to enjoy this bad boy with friends, it's just too good to keep to yourself. And it's way to much pizza for two people to eat safely.
Mmmm.... the smokiness of the bacon somehow permeated the whole thing. It was amazing. I would pay big bucks for this. Good thing I didn't have to.
Enjoy! And think of Chicago.
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