Make it at some point while you’re waiting for your dough to rise, and then you can chill it until you need it. You’ll have plenty of time to make the sauce. Ideally, you want the dough to proof (rise) covered in your refrigerator for at least 24 hours and no more than 48 hours. And we don’t want that here.īy allowing the dough to rise slowly in the refrigerator we’ll slow down fermentation to get a mellower, more tender deep dish pizza crust. Sure, we could do that, but we’d get a different type of pizza crust-one that’s chewier and yeastier. Why can’t we just cover the dough and place it in a warm spot in the kitchen for about an hour like most of the other pizza dough recipes? Easy so far, right?įorm the dough into a ball, then cover it with plastic wrap and get it into your refrigerator for 1 to 2 days. You make it by dissolving the sugar and yeast in the water, and that goes into the flour with margarine and oil and salt. I played with the proportions for 28 batches before finally landing on the best ratio of flour-to-water-to-yeast-to-fat. It’s flakier, like pie crust, which means we’ll need a good amount of fat in the mix. The dough is tricky because it’s not traditional pizza dough. To make a home version you’ll need to plan ahead a little bit because this dough needs to hang out in your fridge for a while to get right. Proper construction of the deep dish is also an important step, but without top-notch good dough and sauce, the rest of it wouldn’t matter. With so many fans of the pizza, I knew it was crucial to get two specific things very right in this famous pizza knock-off: the dough and the sauce. Through decades of hard work, the brothers made Mama Giordano’s secret recipe a Chicago favorite, and Giordano’s restaurants multiplied to over 70 stores in Illinois and around the U.S. Italian immigrants Efren and Joseph Boglio adapted their mother’s Italian Easter Pie and created a deep dish pizza with lots of melted mozzarella baked between two layers of flakey dough. The crucial elements are still there-crust, sauce, cheese, toppings-but there’s more of it, and the ingredients are stacked in a different order in a deep pan, and baked for a long time, like a pie.Ĭhicago-style deep dish pizza had already been popular for 31 years when Giordano’s arrived in town in 1974.
Is it Pizzeria Uno, the originator of deep dish pizza? Or maybe it's Gino's East, with their signature yellow crust? Or perhaps it's Giordano's, and their double-decker stuffed deep dish? Each pizza is unique in its own way and all of them have a devoted fanbase, but with extra cheese, an additional layer of dough-and some aggressive franchising-many are now calling Giordano's Famous Stuffed Deep Dish Pizza the best Chicago deep dish in America.ĭeep dish pizza is traditional flat pizza’s heftier cousin. No discussion of iconic Chicago foods would be complete without talking about deep dish pizza and quibbling over who makes it best.