Binging with Babish: Chicago-Style Pizza from The Daily Show

Not only is deep dish

pizza

not better than New York

pizza

, it's not pizza, it's a casserole. I'm surprised you haven't thought of topping off your deep dish pizza by putting some canned onion rings on top, it's a cornbread cracker that you melted cheese on and then, defying God, man and all things holy, poured sauce on it. Raw marinara on top of the cheese, on top of the cheese on top, on display like some sort of sauce. where this week I'm using Jon Stewart's notorious rants as an excuse to take a look at perhaps Chicago's most controversial

style

of deep-dish pizza.

Now I'm a New Yorker so I had to bring this pizza back and bend the heavens and below. covered in darkness, but to be completely honest, I like Chicago

style

pizza, it has a nice, deep, thick crust that ends up chewy and crispy rather than ready and soft and it has a noticeably large amount of cheese sauce and meats, which that I wouldn't like. I don't do anything as crazy as compare it to New York style pizza, but as its own thing, I like it, so let's start with the base of our pizza, the crust, we start with 8 and 1/4 ounces of room temperature water to the that we are going to add one or two packets and 1/4 teaspoon of active dry yeast along with a teaspoon of sugar which will act as a little snack for our yeast while we let it bloom for 10 minutes, this is one way to boost the effectiveness of the yeast and making sure it is alive and well after 10 minutes.

If you have a nice foamy scrap like this, you're ready to start adding the other ingredients first, let's whip up the dry ones. Fill in 12 and a half ounces of all-purpose flour two and a half ounces of medium ground corn flour one and a half teaspoons of kosher salts and one eighth of a teaspoon of cream of tartar, go ahead and beat with a small whisk to combine, make sure everything be fine. All good and amah Janice and then it's time to wet it or rather add it to the wet ingredients, so in the container with the yeast, the water and the sugar it goes along with 1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil. dough hooks and stir and we'll let this run on low speed for a minute or two until the side of the bowl clears and then we'll increase the speed to medium and let it run for seven to eight. minutes during this time, the dough may seem soft and sticky, but let it go and it should become soft, elastic and pliable, but even if you measure everything exactly, it could end up too hydrated, don't worry because we're just going to lay it out on a work surface. lightly floured and we'll knead it for an additional minute or two until it's a nice smooth and sticky but not sticky consistency, as you can see after my experience with the noodles last week.

I'm kind of a gathering master and very quickly you'll see the dough become light and bouncy and handle a bolt, go ahead and roll it out into a tall ball that we're going to let rise in a lightly greased bowl and like most doughs of pizza, it will get even bigger. handle the bowl after hanging in the bowl for sixty to ninety minutes or until doubled in size, just toss it a little to make sure it is coated and grease, cover with plastic wrap and let it hang at room temperature for about an hour It even looks like this.

It's very strange that I have a before and after like that. I'm a little proud of myself but the truth is that I'm making two pizzas, then comes the choice of the baking container and while Chicago pizzerias We generally use baking trays. aluminum at home. Our best option is cast iron, which along with plenty of vegetable oil lubrication will help our pizza brown more deeply. Go ahead and grease your hands too and gently scoop the dough out of the bowl and place it. the cast iron skillet that awaits us where we will begin to shape it into a pizza or at least with the pizza from Chicago hell, just gently press and stretch the dough and try to push it against the sides of the pan that will resist. a little at first, but that's okay, we'll let it sit covered with plastic wrap for 20 to 30 minutes until the gluten relaxes and we can better form the crust, long enough to talk about the tomato sauce.

Chicago-style tomato sauce is generally very thick and sweet and has big chunks of tomato, so we start with a 28-ounce can of whole San Marzano tomatoes, open them up and square them up there, put them in a bowl and mash them up. hand until we are reduced to small pieces. John specifies that Chicago-style pizza uses raw marinara sauce, but I don't think that's possible and that tomatoes don't turn into sauce until you cook them, so we'll just make a rudimentary marinara. sauce by finely chopping half a white onion, very fine, we don't want large chunks of onion, and crushing and peeling a few cloves of garlic in preparation for mashing.

We've made tomato sauce several times on the

show

, so I'm just going to Sort of a breeze tossed it into a high-sided frying pan with a few tablespoons of olive oil that we're going to heat over medium heat until shimmering, adding our chopped onion and sweating. for two or three minutes or until it is transparent at the edges, adding our crushed garlic. and sauté for another minute until fragrant, add a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes, a little oregano and a little basil, a big shake of basil along with two or three tablespoons of tomato paste, until deep in the flavor that we are going to sauté. that together for an additional mental minute everything smells good and very good and then we are going to add the crushed tomatoes along with a tablespoon of sugar to achieve that rich sweet Chicago style sauce cooking over low heat for 20 to 30 minutes stirring regularly to prevent it from becoming burn over medium heat until the raw tomato flavor has cooked down and the sauce is nice and thick and when you run a spoon through it it splits like a Red Sea bobblehead.

I thought it was funny and at this point our dough should be nice and relaxed. and we should be able to press it against the sides of the pan and it should hold its shape easily. I also forgot to mention that this is a recipe for one 12 inch cast iron skillet or enough to feed approximately 30 to 35 people. Now, all the Chicago pizzas I've seen use sliced ​​deli-style cheese, so we'll start with a thin layer of provolone followed by a nice thick layer of low-moisture sliced ​​mozzarella. I think they use deli-style cheese because it inherently has less moisture, something you don't want in such a thick, rough pizza, and feel free to go a little overboard with the cheese, especially if you want an epic spread of cheese and, as John so devastatingly pointed out , the sauce confuses Leah covered the cheese. so go ahead and spread it generously on top and be sure to make a double batch of sauce if you're making two pizzas, once the cheese is hidden, we're going to hit the pizza with two finishing moves first, a generous sprinkle of pre-grated cheese.

Parmesan and then a generous drizzle of olive oil both in the sauce and around the edge of the crust because it's not like we're trying to be healthy here. I mean, this pizza is like five and six pounds and it's finally time for it to go in. a preheated oven at 425 degrees fahrenheit for 25 to 35 minutes, turning once during baking until this happens, run a thin spatula around the outside edge to make sure it doesn't stick and then it will be time for the heroic act of removing the pizza from the pan you just finished You have to trust the structural integrity of the pizza and it will come out, and then you have to wait at least 10 minutes before cutting and serving it.

I didn't wait 10 minutes. I was hungry and I had hungry friends in the other room and this is what happened. a really very nice cheese for the thumb and then a sauce that was too sloppy. Pizza flood, you won't hear me complain because despite the stringiness of this thing it was completely delicious, the cheese of course had cheese, the sauce. of course it was spicy but the crust is what separates a good Chicago style from a bad Chicago style and I'm just going to take a quick prophylactic measure here BA, like I was saying the crust is light and crispy and you can chew it well without being clever or heavy.

I know I didn't use butter in the crust, but it is somehow buttery and flaky, making it an obvious and immediate member of the Clean Plate Club at the expense of my mouth, which was badly burned and a once it cools We can take a closer look at its structure in composition, as you can see, the crust is thick without being too dense, the cheese and toppings are omnipresent and I would go toe to toe with restaurant pizza any day, it seems They have a little more sauce. a lot than me, but everything else is pretty perfect, but this wouldn't be a stuffed pizza without a little bit of filling, so I've got some mild Italian sausage here that I'm removing from its casings and patting it into a patty and then they're the same procedures. before you stuff the dough into a greased pan, let it sit for 20 to 30 minutes while you make the sauce, then finish patting it to give it its final shape and then before we put the cheese on, we'll start by putting the sausage on and Yes, this one is a raw sausage, which is weird I know, but this pizza spends a lot of time in the oven, so it will be cooked completely once the sausage is spread out in a nice, even layer, covered with the cheese sauce and more cheese, in the same cooking time and temperature. 425 Fahrenheit for 25 to 35 minutes and that's it, same thing but with sausage and let me tell you right now that I'm a big fan of both Jon Stewart and New York style pizza, but I think Chicago pizza is still pizza in its own right .

It is a product of its environment. New York-style pizza would turn into an icicle of cheese if it were exposed to the air in Chicago for even a minute. That said, I would never say it's better than New York style because that would be crazy, but just like every pizza on this crazy blue marble floating in space, it has the right to exist and find its own happiness and with that being said, there's only one left thing to try. John suggested a preparation with some canned onions on top and I must say it's not that. I mean, it's better than California Pizza Hello friends, I am very excited to announce that I have received my first advance copy of my book and even more excited than before.

I'm super excited and proud to share it with you. This is the binge. with a companion cookbook by Babish and features the

show

's first hundred recipes to tell lots of fun facts, beautiful burger models, gorgeous behind-the-scenes photography, and an extremely moving foreword by Jon Favreau. You can pre-order your copy in the video description below for access to exclusive content before the book goes on sale on October 22, as well as tickets to my national book tour, check it out and I'll see you on the road in two weeks.