pizza

Heather and I drove from Des Moines Thursday night, to the western edge of the Chicago metro area. We stayed in Naperville, at a hotel with easy access to the train station.

Friday morning we took kind of a casual start, and were almost too late getting downstairs to get breakfast. I am really glad we weren’t though, because the breakfast room had those big Belgian waffle makers that clam shell open, and can flip over in their mounting. Combine one of those with good batter, and you have an amazing waffle! It was a great way to start our first day of a mini vacation!

Leaving the hotel, we managed to miss three different turns on the way to the “easy to get to” train station. In hind sight, it wasn’t hard find, we just missed some easy turns. We ended up missing the train by about ten minutes. The next train wasn’t due for another hour, so we decided to walk around the Naperville downtown.

Fun side note, calling the town “nap-ville” will get a rise out of Heather most of the time. 🙂

The weather was just warm enough to call it nice, and we really enjoyed getting to walk around the nicely restored / preserved downtown area. They have a little river that runs through the middle of the area, and some parks we looked at. After living in a snow and ice covered city for the last few months, seeing some green in the parks was really refreshing.

Next, we headed back to the train station, caught our train, and hit the city! The city, as it turned out, was rainy and cold, with a touch of fog. We worked our way over to Michigan Avenue (aka “The Magnificent Mile”) and kind of took in the sights. Our only real stops were the Disney store and the Hershey’s shop. Makes the trip sound less… sophisticated I suppose, but that’s where we stopped.

After some time looking at the shops and people, we headed out to Navy Pier. When we were last in Chicago, the place was a rather busy carnival atmosphere. On a cold foggy day it was more of a lonely eerie kind of place.

I really started to wonder what that kind of a day would be like for a local, it seemed strange to me to not be able to see the normal skyline at all. We could only see the first few buildings before the fog enveloped the city. It kind of made me wish we had a better camera, but then again a more robust camera would have been to big to lug around all day in the name of “just in case we see something cool”

At this point, the day was starting to get late, so we headed back down town to find some pizza before catching our train back to our hotel. Friday night is kind of busy as it turns out, and the wait to get a table was 30-40 minutes. We ended up in line between some former UNL students, and some current Des Moines residents. The world is just as small as people say I guess. Eventually we got a table, and some pizza.

Shortly thereafter, we discovered that eating what winds up being one inch of pure cheese in a almost pastry crust, isn’t quite as rewarding after you have walked five miles, and are cold and dehydrated. It was still good, but it hit a lot harder than expected. We really found this out when we started walking again, and had about a mile left to get back to the train station. It wasn’t like we were in pain, but we were moving a little slow, and it was becoming clear that we were going to miss our train again. Lucky for us there are taxis everywhere, so we managed to make the train with time to spare!

This is a rather large post, and I feel like I glazed over so many details. It does pretty much sum up day one though!

-Jordan

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

Chicago Day One

Pizza!