Deep Dish Pizza

What good midwestern native doesn't love Chicago style deep dish pizza.  I know that I love it, but it's primarily a delicacy reserved for delivery.  Though if you're in Champaign you have to get Papa Dells, especially on an Illinois game day.  Doesn't matter that you'll wait up to 90 minutes for a table, though you can probably get in faster if you commit sacrilege and go to the off campus location.

I'd like to think that I could have made a better Chicago style deep dish at home, but who was I kidding, especially when the gold standard for me is the Dells.  Oh Papa Dells how I wish you were in Bloomington Normal.

 The stuff for the dough, now my last couple attempts at making dough of any kind have been MASSIVE FAILS so I was kind of leary of doing it here.  Thankfully, it worked out just the way it should have but still.  Here we have flour, salt, sugar, yeast, cornmeal, water and oil.

The flour, cornmeal and salt got mixed in a stand mixer, just waiting for the wet ingredients.

Here we have the yeast, water, oil and sugar.  The liquid was then poured into the moving mixer.

The completed dough, getting ready to sit around and rise up.

The dough after an hour, hallelujiah it actually worked.  Doubled in size just like it was supposed to.  From here I punched it down and let it sit around for about another hour.

Holy crap, it's still doing what it's supposed to.  From here I actually put it in the fridge to get it to slow down a bit until I was ready to cook with it.

Here's all the ingredients for the topping part of the pizza.  Onions, mushrooms, red pepper flakes, sausage, tomatoes, garlic, mozzarella, basil, pepperoni, and ham.

The dough got rolled out to about a 1/4 inch.

Time to blind bake the dough.  The purpose behind this is to make sure the dough will be cooked through at the same time as the casserole level of fillings.  You can actually purchase pie weights for this purpose if you do this enough.  But for the every day cook dry beans are perfect and they are a whole lot cheaper.

Here is the sausage browning off in a saute pan.

 I removed the sausage from the pan and sauteed the mushrooms.

Time for the onions to join in.

It wasn't in the original picture, but the red peppers went in next.

After a couple minutes I pulled the dough out of the oven and removed the foil and then baked off what was left.  This is the result after about 5 or 6 minutes in the oven.

I added the sausage back to the vegetable mixture just to heat everything through.

The stuffed pizza ready to go into the oven.

Yeah I probably should have covered the edge of that crust with foil, but holy crap was this thing delicious.

Stuffed pizza isn't meant to plate well.  One of the few exceptions to the eat with your eyes rule.