{How Not to Make} Lou Malnati's Chicago Classic Deep Dish Pizza, packed with sausage and cheese and flavorful tomato sauce.
Don't worry, like the trashy romance novels I adore, there is a happy ending [and a viable recipe] at the end of this post. But when you find yourself saying
"once I drained the pizza, it tasted pretty good"
you know there's a story worth sharing.
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Once upon a time [actually last month] a family traveled to Chicago for a short vacation. The dad planned out the route, the lodging, and the sights to see. The mom prepared what to eat en route, arranged for the dogs to spend their first nights away from the family at a loving kennel, and scouted pizza places to try Chicago's famous deep dish style pizza. [The kids grumbled about not spending a week lying on the couch staring at screens.]
Forgetting that pesky time zone thing, we arrived early enough to walk/roll around the downtown area, and especially to walk to the first pizza place on The List: Lou Malnati's. We ordered a Chicago Classic and a Lou. When they arrived, I took some mental notes:
- The crust is not puffy, not like a yeasted dough that's allowed to rise at the edges. It's not like Zebra Room flaky pie crust either. It's crispy/crunchy . . . maybe cornmeal?
- The sausage was undisturbed until I cut through it with my fork--it was in a disc the size of the pizza pan, and without browned edges--I think it was placed raw on the pizza and cooked during the pizza baking time.
- The tomatoes don't look like tomato sauce--they look more like my canned crushed tomatoes. The juice is clear, not cloudy like in a cooked sauce with tomato paste.
With a basic idea in mind I set out to make a deep dish pizza. My previous attempt at a deep dish pizza ended in a spectacularly inedible failure, shown on my FB page, when I attempted to cram way too much Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share spinach into the pizza. But that merely tasted terrible.
My first attempt at a pizza similar to Lou Malnati's Chicago Classic involved grabbing a ball of previously fresh mozzarella out of the freezer. Now, I know that using thawed balls of mozzarella results in a seedy pizza. I've commented here about the phenomenon. However, I didn't heed my own advice. First Big Mistake.
I also scooped out the crushed tomatoes using a slotted spoon, which meant that the tomatoes were already pretty juicy when they went onto the pizza. You know the heat of the oven is going to denature the proteins in the plant cell walls, causing them to burst and release more fluid--so that was my Second Big Mistake.
With those two mistakes synergizing in my skillet, it's no wonder why it happened. When I pulled the skillet out, the pizza looked great--if a little jiggly. The cheese was browned, the sausage cooked and the crust was crisp--what you want in a pizza.
Then I tried to extricate the pizza, and a tsunami of fluid swarmed out--over the skillet, the counter, the cooling rack, and into the sink [everywhere but where the dogs could reach--they were disappointed]. Thus leading me to the comment.
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| "once I drained the pizza, it tasted pretty good" |
