One thing I can say for certain, is that it is January here. The past week has felt almost tropical, when the temperature slipped above freezing for a few hours during the day. The piles of snow around our apartment are so large you cannot see over them anymore. To put it gently, there isn’t much to make you want to go outside.
With that in mind I have been looking for interesting cooking projects. One I found was for a Chicago style pizza that looked interesting.
I ended up using a recipe my mom gave me for the crust instead of the one listed, used normal sauce instead of the diced tomatoes, hamburger instead of sausage, and an electric oven instead of gas. So pretty much I only used a small fraction of the guys idea, but still….
Anyway, the dough covered a much larger area than I really needed, so it kind of flopped over the edges. I figured I could deal with that later, and added quite a bit of hamburger.
This is about the time I realized I hadn’t really planned out how closely I was going to stick to the advice online, because I didn’t want to try the diced tomatoes track. I figured some garlic couldn’t hurt though, so I chopped up a few cloves and dumped them in. I sprinkled in some oregano too for good measure. Then I topped that with *a lot* of cheese and some mushrooms.
There was still room left in the skillet, but I didn’t think it would be a good idea to use any more mushrooms. I still had a little hamburger left though, so I used the last of that. Then I added the remains of a can of Prego red sauce. I was really afraid this would make things too runny, but the hamburger and mushrooms seemed to be soaking it up really well.
Again, I realized that I wasn’t planning too well. The pseudo recipe I was using appeared to use pepperoni to kind of shield the top of the pizza from burning. I think the comment said something about the top getting “crispy like bacon” but at the same time it wasn’t going to seem very pizza-like if I didn’t at least put cheese on the top. In hindsight, the one time I had pizza in Chicago, they clearly baked the pizza, then added the sauce right before they brought it out. That pizza was different than what I was shooting for here anyway. I ended up adding some cheese.
As you can see, I also trimmed off the extra dough around the edges. At this point I used the tip somebody posted later on in that pizza thread I was using as a recipe, and placed the pan at the bottom of the oven, and a cookie sheet on a rack clear at the top. Then I set the oven for 500, waited for it to get up to temp, and backed it off to 400. The only thing I did that may have changed cooking conditions was I swapped out the top cookie sheet for one that had bread stick things from the extra crust for a few minutes after I turned the temp down. The final result looked promising.
The crust had a lot of structural strength, and didn’t stick to the pan at all (did I mention I had aggressively rubbed butter on the pan before I started?). I was able to lift and slide the pizza out without any problems.
Cutting it up was a little difficult, due to the fact that it was a little soupy. I was initially afraid that was from too much sauce, but it turned out that was just because the cheese was still melted.
After just a few more minutes things began to set a little more, and we ended up with nice thick pie-like slices.
I was quite happy with the end result. It took way longer than I had planned, partially due to the prep time on the dough for the crust, and partially due to the cook-time being a lot longer than the ~40 minutes I was expecting (pre-heat takes more than 10 minutes when you go up to 500). The crust was good, but nothing like the “pan” pizza from say Pizza Hut. I shudder to think how much oil I would have to use to get that effect. I think I am happy with the effect I got, and I don’t see a reason to pack a ton more fat into what isn’t really health food as it stands, I was just expecting something different.
So to summarize:
- Grease the skillet, but don’t expect a fried-bread crust
- Electric ovens seem to work fine, if you use a blocking sheet for the top element
- Cheese only works as a topping, although I would like to try pepperoni next time
- Plan ahead so you have 2+ hours to make this before you want to eat
-Jordan
Nelsons 