Chicago Thin Crust Tavern Style Pizza

Hi everyone, I'm Chef Tom from atbbq.com and this is the Chicago Thin Crust Tavern Style Pizza that we're all familiar with. Chicago deep dish

pizza

is iconic, no doubt, but there's another Chicago

pizza

that may win over even more hearts. from Chicago natives and that's

tavern

style

pizza, it's a

thin

cookie-like

crust

that's loaded to the edges with ingredients and you usually see it cut party

style

or

tavern

style into squares, really edible little squares that leave you thirsty for further. beer, but don't get too full so you can always buy more beer. The tavern has it all figured out.

Well, we're going to jump right into this and start by making the dough, so we'll start by building this. dough in the food processor today with 250 grams of all-purpose flour, we don't need that high protein of double flour, so we skip that Madden 12 grams of sugar seven grams of kosher salt 5 grams of active dry yeast No you need this to bloom first, it will do its job once every

thin

g is together and then we need some warm water 110 degrees 150 grams. All these measures will also be shown in a volume on our blog that you can always consult. access from the link in the video description so I'm also going to add 36 grams of extra virgin olive oil right here to our warm water.

We're going to baste this with the food processor running, you'll see. Roll it into a ball and start walking around the edges, so we're going to give it another 10 seconds, so we're just going to place this dough on our work surface. It should be pretty sticky at this point, so I'll just use floured hands to work this. I'm going to knead it a little bit until we get a nice tension and a little bit of smoothness on the surface. I need that kind of ball shape, that's it, that's all we need, nice and smooth on the top. and this is ready to ferment.

I'm going to put some olive oil in our container. Throw this here until it doubles in size so that's what it looks like when it's fully fermented. At this point, we're going to convert this. and divide it in two for two separate pizzas, if I'm going to be particularly precise about it, I'm just going to weigh it here 450 grams, 221 minus times four, I'll take it, so we're just going to work like this. folding it under itself again, putting a little bit of tension on the top of the dough ball that looks good like this, pinch it a little bit and then it's going to go into a greased bowl to rest, so you're going to want this to go in the refrigerator and rest for at least 30 minutes, but honestly, it can sit for hours once it hits the refrigerator.

I want it to be covered in the refrigerator and let's move on to our sauce. We're going to start with a full 29 ounce can of San Marzano tomatoes, these are them. whole tomatoes we're going to break this down into a nice, smooth, slightly sweet sauce, so you're going to have two tablespoons of sugar, two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, that fat helps move that flavor, two cloves of garlic and one tablespoon. Cattleman's Grill Italian put this in and just whisk it until smooth and easy. Now the sauce we want to cook lowers one to reduce it so that it is not so liquid and two to help develop these flavors and deepen them.

Take note of the color of this sauce. At this point it's going to get a little darker as it shrinks. We're going to try to reduce this to about two cups, but I'll explain how to finish so you know when it's done when we get to that point for now. put it on medium heat bring it to a simmer and then turn it down to a simmer and let it go so it's going to take about 20 minutes to get to this point but what you can see here is that when I throw a spoon over here not filling it behind and that is my indicator that it's thickened to the consistency I'm looking for now.

I'm going to transfer this to a baking sheet and throw it in the refrigerator to really chill. quick for us so we can start preparing our pizzas, so now that the dough balls have had time to rest, we will roll them out nice and thin to cook our pizza starting on a baking sheet which makes it very easy to determine how far point roll out the dough because you can take a baking sheet and aim for the width of that sheet. Imagine there are some places, restaurants that only use a sheeter or you can take this pizza. a dough and run it through a sheeter to get the exact thickness every time, but you can totally do it by hand, so here's the tricky part about this style of pizza.

I have cooked it without using this technique and cooked it. using this technique, but when it comes down to it, the best way to get a crispy cookie

crust

is to transfer it to a wire rack and let it sit on the kitchen counter overnight. I know it sucks because it's a two day project now, but the dehydrating thing that happens is what really allows this dough to crisp up in the end, so here's what our pizza dough looks like after it's been sitting out overnight. . You see how it dries out around the edges, but it's still a little soft, it still has its flakiness.

This is what will give us that beautiful, really crispy cookie crust, really quickly. Shout out to Kenji from Serious Eats if it weren't for all the research he's done on tavern-style pizzas. My pizza wouldn't be what it is today and this trick specifically is what really took it to the next level. Implementing this and letting it sit uncovered overnight really took it to the next level, so we'll go ahead and build this onto the pizza peel for easy transfer. I'm going to load it with our sauce, first the sauce cools and again one of the defining characteristics of the Tavern style is that you're going to take all of these ingredients to the brim, a little bit more than I need, on top. of the sauce I'm going to add a little fresh oregano.

I love that fresh oregano flavor. Choose fresh oregano. You will never buy dried oregano again. You'll never want to go back to the next thing. We have our low-moisture mozzarella, taking it all the way. edge too and then you can make any kind of dressing, of course, Chicagoans love their Italian sausage. We just did that in our deep dish video so we're going to change it up a little bit today we're going to make some pepperonis and some sport peppers okay fully loaded let's get to the grill today we're cooking on the Yoder Smokers ys640s pellet grill with oak pellets and I have the wood oven installed so we can get a really nice quick cook with excellent browning.

Above I set it to 450 degrees. There is sort of a two-step process to cooking this pizza. We are going to start by cooking it on a baking sheet with a little olive oil. I'm just warming it up right now and that's it. to give it a really nice fried texture on the bottom and then we'll remove it and finish it on the stone, so just about 60 seconds to leave it there so as soon as this oil comes in it's probably hot. one or two tablespoons right there and then we're going to slide our pizza right on top of the hot oil slide there set a timer for five minutes in five minutes now I'm going to see if we can remove this from our pan and in the oven we're going good ha after another minute, now we just give it a little rotation so it cooks evenly, we're starting to get a really nice crispy texture around the edges, we still have a little way to go. 10 minutes total cook time now we're getting a great browning on the cheese, we've got that crispy crust on the side, look at that cookie like a big crunch, getting it out nicely on the second round, this is our second pizza again. in just over 10 minutes you got that great crispy crust, looks good man you can hear the crispiness, look at this, holding up under the weight of the ingredients which is great, the bottom has an almost fried texture to it, which makes even more or less flaky for a pizza crust, let's see the taste, oh man, such a great texture because it's like a cookie that's been fried a little bit, not as super crispy as a cookie because it's got a little bit of chew to it too, um sauce is great A little sweet a lot of those Italian flavors Italian pepperoni is always great sport pepper oh I love that pickled intelligence just a little bit of heat another tribute to Chicago you'll also be tempted to eat a whole pie Well thank you very much everyone to watch, be sure to visit atbbq.com to see all the products featured in today's video.

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