Chicago Crust Leaves me Unimpressed

I decided to try my hand at Chicago style pizza again last night. The results were mixed.

There is a guy who has a site called Real Deep Dish Pizza, and he publishes a recipe he calls the Holy Grail. He says he updates the recipe sometimes. You can download it as a PDF. There is no point in linking to the site. You’ll find it fast if you want.

Internet pizza people respect this guy, so I thought his recipe ought to be a good starting point.

I tried mail-order pizza from Lou Malnati’s over the last few days. The cheese pizza was pretty good, although the crust was harder than I thought it should have been. The sausage pizza was not good because the sausage boiled in the sauce. The sauce in Chicago style pizza goes above the cheese, and the toppings to in between, so they boil. There was no browning at all.

I liked one thing about the style. Putting the sauce on top makes it possible to use nearly any cheese. Only a few cheeses will work on top of a pizza. Radiant heat makes cheese behave badly, and if your cheese is in the 98% that don’t work, you will get brown cheese, tough cheese, greasy cheese, wet cheese, or some other disastrous result.

I decided to use Holy Grail crust and my own sauce and cheese. I thought that if I tried plain old grocery mozzarella, and it worked, I would have a secret weapon for those times when I didn’t feel like paying for overpriced cheese locally or driving to get restaurant cheese. I decided to use brick whole milk mozzarella. Not even low moisture. This was risky, because cheese that isn’t low moisture can release a lot of water. I thought it wouldn’t matter, because the cheese was going to be sitting in sauce. The water would go into the sauce, where it couldn’t hurt anything.

I don’t have a 12″ pizza pan, which is what the crust recipe was supposed to fit. I do have cast iron skillets, but I didn’t want to fool with them. I got myself a 9″ by 13″ steel nonstick pan at my local grocery. I did some math and decided I needed to scale the circular recipe up by a factor of 1.1.

Making the dough was no problem. I dumped everything but the oil in the Cuisinart, beat it up, let it rest 5 minutes so the water got into the flour, and blended the corn oil in. I used a lot of yeast, which is generally a bad idea, but I was in a rush. The dough rose fine, and it was easier to handle than ordinary dough. The oil made a difference.

I used a pound of Galbani mozzarella in thick slices. I used a pint of sauce made from Cento crushed tomatoes and a little Stanislaus Saporito sauce, which is tomato paste and basil. I added garlic, oregano, and a little sugar. I used both powdered and fresh garlic because they complement each other.

I baked at 450° for maybe 40 minutes. The pie baked up fine, but I had to put foil over it to prevent the exposed parts of the crust from burning.

The cheese worked. That was a big relief. It was just like the cheese you would find in fried mozzarella in a mid-tier restaurant. The sauce was good, but next time I’ll reduce the Saporito, because it made it a little ketchupy.

The crust was not thrilling. The texture was about like the frozen pies, only better, but the flavor was bland. The crusts on the frozen pies had a corn flavor. There was no cornmeal in them, so it must have come from the oil Malnati’s used. Some people recommend butter-flavored Crisco, which sounds gross.

The crust was too thick, so my guess is that the guy who wrote the recipe for a 12″ pie used too much stuff. It was half an inch thick on the bottom, which is almost twice as thick as the crusts on the frozen pies.

I don’t know if I’ll keep trying, because Sicilian and Detroit style (thinner Sicilian, more or less) are fantastic, and I don’t think Chicago style can measure up, even at its best. I think you have to be raised on it to love it. If I do try, I’ll look for a different oil or shortening. I will definitely use less yeast.

Think about this. New York style is the most popular pizza in North America. It started way over on the East Coast, and they now sell it in Alaska and Hawaii. Neapolitan style has caught on, too. You can find it in every big American city. In 8 decades, Chicago style has gone almost nowhere. There are very, very few places outside of Illinois that sell it. If it’s so great, why doesn’t anyone want it?

You can claim it’s because it takes 45 minutes to get a pizza, but I think that if it were as good as other pizzas, people would wait.

Many Chicagoans say it’s for tourists. Thin-crust Chicago tavern-style pizza seems to get more respect locally.

Tourists. Why would anyone go to Chicago as a tourist. What is there to see? The weather is bad. The land is flat and boring. The people have gone insane. You’re literally safer in a military unit in a war than you are in a Chicago ghetto on a holiday.

Although the Chicago deep-dish style is not that good, I got very useful information from the attempt. From now on, when I don’t have restaurant supply cheese and I don’t feel like paying $11 per pound for deli cheese, I’ll use grocery cheese and put the sauce on top. It won’t work with toppings, because who likes boiled toppings? But it will be great for cheese pizza, which I love.

Now that my pizza adventure has been chronicled, I’ll move on to the convention.

I’m glad J.D. Vance was chosen to run with Trump. He was my choice. He’s conservative, and he’s very smart. I don’t know whether he is popular enough to help Trump win, though. I haven’t studied the issue. Maybe I’m wrong to think he would be a good choice for president. I admit, I’m winging it.

It was interesting to see him get the spot because I have so much in common with him.

Vance’s parents are from Jackson, Kentucky, in Breathitt County. My grandfather was the circuit judge there. As you move eastward in Kentucky, the people get more ghetto. Breathitt is the farthest east of the counties where my grandfather held court.

To be quite honest, the people of Breathitt are a mess. They used to call it “bloody Breathitt” because the people were so violent. My mother used to tell two stories about Breathitt. One was that the Army recruited doctors from Breathitt during wars because they were so used to treating bullet wounds. That’s probably a myth. America has always had plenty of doctors who knew how to treat bullet wounds, and I doubt Breathitt ever had more than two doctors until maybe 1970. The second story was that they never had to draft anyone in Breathitt, because the men were so anxious to enlist and kill people. That, I could believe.

My dad always said there were a lot of people in Breathitt whose eyes were too close together.

There is a lot of white trash there, if you want the truth. The counties to the west of Breathitt are not great, but Breathitt is on a lower level.

Vance is famous for writing a book, Hillbilly Elegy, that became a movie. Ron Howard, that great expert on Appalachia, directed. Hey, he grew up in Mayberry, didn’t he?

Like a lot of people trying to escape the downward pull of Eastern Kentucky, Vance’s parents moved from Jackson to Ohio, and evidently, it was not much of a step up. My understanding is that his parents weren’t much, and they continued dragging him down. He had a grandmother who pushed him to succeed.

I have not read Vance’s book, and I don’t plan to. I have never seen the movie. I saw a clip. It was pretty ridiculous.

On the one hand, Glenn Close, as the grandmother, looked the part. She has a big bony Celt head, just like many of my female relatives. As far as appearance goes, she nailed it. Set her down among my female second cousins, and she would fit right in. The dialogue, however, was way off. No one cursed. No one waved a burning cigarette while talking. No one used any of the colloquialisms I remember from my youth.

Maybe they should have had Cameron Crowe direct it. His grandfather came from Stanton, another county seat where my grandfather served as judge. Crowe’s ear might have been better.

My story is quite different. For one thing, I have never achieved much of anything, nor have I ever had any ambition. For another, my parents were both Mensa material, and both were educated. They never completely overcame their roots. My mother had terrible taste, and my dad held onto his coal-camp manners. But they were very smart. They were well-read.

My dad was the best lawyer I ever knew, and that includes every area of practice, from the library to the courtroom.

Unlike me, Vance has no accent at all. That’s weird. And he seems to have assimilated completely, book and movie notwithstanding.

I have an aunt who gets excited when anyone from Eastern Kentucky does well. She seems determined to convince people Eastern Kentucky is an incubator of unrecognized genius. Any acquaintance of hers who can stand upright and write his name is an unsung renaissance man. She has bragged to me about Woody Stephens and Cameron Crowe. It’s her way of vindicating her strange prejudices about the region.

My aunt told me about J.D. Vance a few years ago. I had no idea who he was, and I did not feel compelled to learn. She thinks he’s fantastic. On the other hand, she holds herself out as a liberal, so I have to wonder how she is dealing with his nomination. She is in no way liberal except in that she pretends to be one and makes excuses for her undeserving demographic, but she has painted herself into a corner as far as Vance is concerned. If she brags about him, she can’t really reconcile it with the reputation she has tried to cultivate. She will offend people she has tried to impress.

She doesn’t think he’s fantastic because he’s conservative or good presidential timber. She thinks he’s fantastic because he’s famous and he came from Eastern Kentucky. That’s all it takes.

Anyway, it’s interesting to see a person with whom I have so much in common, running for the office of vice president. I don’t think his Appalachian background is an asset. It’s just a handicap he overcame.

I was sorry to see that the GOP had a slut speak. I mean Amber Rose. She is a big part of the slut walk movement. She poses for nude photos. She promotes homosexuality. Disgusting.

How desperate are we? This is where razor-thin election margins have put us. Simping for women who sleep with rappers.

I was also sorry to see them let Harmeet Dhillon, a pagan, deliver a prayer. I don’t know anything about her except that she is a Sikh. Sikhism rejects Yeshua’s teachings, so it comes from Satan and leads people to hell, in addition to corrupting their lives here on Earth.

God–Yeshua–isn’t looking down and approving of the GOP for being open-minded. He knows he has been disrespected, and that has consequences.

I’m a monarchist and a theocrat. I obey our laws, and I’m not planning to overthrow the government, but from now on, I will do my best to vote for whoever brings us closer to a Christian theocracy based in charismatic doctrine. I don’t care whom I offend. I don’t care about our idiotic obsession with separating church and state. I don’t care about making people of other faiths comfortable. Yeshua made people extremely uncomfortable. People of other faiths worship demons and go to hell. I don’t support those things.

Religious inclusivity is the most un-Christian policy imaginable.

I assume they will also have prayers from a Muslim and a Jew who thinks Yeshua was a magician and a fraud and who follows sages who made their living teaching blasphemy.

I’m with the GOP because it’s the closest thing we have to a Christian party. The more we strive to be popular, bringing in disgusting people and people who are badly misled, the less salt we have in ourselves and the less motivation God has to help conservatives. When we become just like leftists, God will have no reason to help us.

I can’t vote for a proper party, so I vote for the least-vile party. It’s getting to the point where I have no one to stand with.

I wore my old MAGA hat today, figuring I should honor a man who just got shot for me, along with the others who were shot. I don’t know if I should wear it again. I love Trump, but he’s no messiah, and he and his family put Amber Rose on the stage.

I hope Trump wins, but America is lost either way.