What does cornmeal do for deep-dish?

[mykall]

Reading through this forum I'm seeing more and more references to not using cornmeal.  The Uno's recipe from the recipe section of this site is the same one that's in the Chicago Pizza book I have, and it includes cornmeal.  Malnati's and Gineos East do not.  So what exactly does cornmeal do for the DD dough?  I got my pans today and my next pizza is going to be a Chicago style and I'd like to know so I can pick a recipe.

Thanks

Mike

[loowaters]

Primarily texture but also a somewhat different flavor is what you get with cornmeal.  It's not used by any of the big time deep dish places but that hasn't stopped anyone from giving it a try and finding out for themselves if it's an improvement.  When I was first trying to figure out this whole DD thing I wanted to duplicate what Gino's East was doing and as soon as I found out there was no cornmeal in it I dropped that from my ingredient list.  Further down the road, just to mix it up a bit, I tried it again and while it was still good, IMO, it wasn't better than the pies I was making without it.

[mykall]

Thanks Loo,

I think I'll try it w/o.  I was thinking that maybe what cornmeal did was to give the crust that crunchy/oily texture that Pizza Hut pan had back in the 80's, I say 80's because the last time I had P.H. the 80's magic was gone.  There are a couple of good recipes on this site but I'm having trouble converting the baker's percentages, I thought I saw a conversion spreadsheet somewhere, but I'm probably wrong.

[widespreadpizza]

MYkall,  for what its worth,  some members have used medium semolina to achieve the texture without the flavor.  I have tried it and it works very well.  I use 10% when I make this style of pizza. -marc