My Excellent Chicago Deep Dish Pizza Experiment Part 1

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Regional food is sensational and replicating these items at home are a challenge I never turn down. Chicago is famous for a few. Italian beef I have conquered. The Chicago-Style Hot Dog is a joke. Layering on a ton of sh!t on a hot dog so you cannot even taste the meat makes no sense to me. No challenge there. The Chicago-Style deep dish pizza is one item I have yet to successfully imitate. So far.


The year was 1972. I was attending art school in Chicago. Friends I met there wanted to go out one Friday for lunch at a nearby pizza place called Gino’s East on Superior just east of Michigan Ave. Being dirt poor at the time and usually packing a lunch I thought what the heck, I would have to sacrifice drinking beer that night.

Little did I know this was going to be a pizza like none I ever had. The fvcking cheese was on the bottom! It was built upside down but tasted fabulous. And very filling too.

All my adult life I have been on a quest to make restaurant quality pizza at home. Steve H. published his exploits in home pizza perfection a few years ago and it is so perfect I have been making it ever since. The secret was using the pizza stone. But his is a New York-style thin crust (which is still my favorite pizza).


I am a huge advocate of Cook’s Illustrated magazine, the finest cooking publication on this planet. Their television program airs on PBS out of Chicago on Saturdays and if I am home I will make time to watch it. You can learn more about food in a few half-hour “America’s Test Kitchen” programs than you will watching The Food Network for ten years.


The latest Cook’s Illustrated came in the mail last Tuesday with a recipe for making a Chicago deep dish pizza. This is one recipe I could not pass up because making and baking a quality deep dish is very difficult. All my previous results were usually sub par compared to Gino's East.

I won’t publish the recipe here (it’s too long) but if you shoot me an email I will gladly send it to you.


My Excellent Chicago Deep Dish Pizza Experiment Part 2 is directly below
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