In nearly every case, the title of the restaurant is also the link to the restaurant’s website. I brought home more pizza boxes than I should have, and I’m sure my kids are just as happy as I am that this crazy, insane field work is over. The methodology for this Thick Quest was much like the thin one: visit anonymously, order a small half sausage-half pepperoni, try a few bites of each, pay, then take notes and post any Instagram shots after leaving. Being forced to eat an entire stuffed pizza solo is the culinary equivalent of waterboarding.
They all made me feel ill afterwards, as my intestines clogged with more cheese, sauce and dough than anyone should be forced to endure in one sitting.
I know I’ve promised to do a Top 5 list for stuffed in a few days, but seriously, I just can’t get behind any of them. These pizzas look great on Instagram, with the sexy cheese “pull” shots as you lift out a slice, but honestly, if I never eat another stuffed pizza again in my life it will be too soon. In a stuffed variation, a second, thinner layer of dough is placed on top of the toppings, truly forming a pizza casserole/pot pie sort of thing, topped eventually with another layer of thin tomato sauce.
Then on go the toppings – sausage, peppers, whatever – followed by the slightly chunky tomato sauce. Mozzarella slices are placed down first, serving as a sort of curd-and-whey shield/defense system, keeping the dough from getting too soggy at the bottom. The pans are rubbed generously with corn or vegetable oil, then the oily dough – sometimes laced with butter, like Lou Malnati’s – is jammed and pressed into the corners and up the sides. After eating dozens of pizzas over the course of two months, I realize that there really isn’t that much of a difference, and thus, for the purposes of this #ChicagoPizzaQuestThick, I have delineated just two categories: Deep and Stuffed.īoth of these pizzas begin with well-oiled, Allied Deep Dish Non-Stick Black Buster pizza pans, about two inches high. Also, there’s some disagreement about whether or not the architecture is identical: while all of these pizzas have cheese as a bottom layer, some disagree about whether sauce comes next followed by toppings, or vice versa. Another alleged difference: “deep” pizzas typically have the outer edge of dough pushed up along the high edge of the steel pan it’s baked in, while the middle 98% of the pizza remains a good inch or so lower (Lou Malnati’s, for example), while “pan” pizzas do not have an extra high outer lip. Of course, everyone else in the city who thinks of deep dish merely as a cheese casserole was probably cheering right along with Stewart, as were, no doubt, the locals from the South and Southwest Sides, where tavern-style is still equated with “Chicago style” more than anything that comes out of a two-inch high metal pan.Īnd speaking of pan, is there really a difference between pan and deep? I looked into it a bit more, and the only thing I could come up with was that pan is par-baked while deep is not (hence the average wait time of 40-45 minutes). Lovers of deep dish are probably still smarting from Jon Stewart’s famous rant from two years ago, when he tore into the city’s iconic pie so hard, it required a (tepid) on-air rebuttal from Marc Malnati.
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