My first attempt at 14" Chicago deep dish

[T-bone]

Long story short, everyone like it the flavor.  So that's the main thing.  Some did not like the construction since it was not a pizza that we used to eating.  This is the first Chicago deep dish for all of us.

I used a aluminum anodized 14" pan from Lloyd pans.

FOR THE DOUGH
450g or about 3 1/4C AP flour
40g or 1/4C cornmeal
12g or 3 TSP sugar
15g or 3 TSP salt
275g or 1 1/4C water (85F)
110g or 8 TBSP (1 stick) butter, cubed
9g or 3 TSP active dry yeast

After I combined the dry  ingredients in a 12-cup food processor, I added the cubed butter one at a time.  Once the contents became kind of pebbled looking, that's when I started to add the water.

Let rise at room temperature for 90 minutes.  Then I moved it into the fridge for 1 hour to rise again.  And then after 1 hour in the fridge, I roll it to size and make the pie.

FOR THE SAUCE
1 28 oz can cento San marzano whole tomatoes
2 minced garlic cloves
10g or 1 TBPS SUGAR
1g or 1/2 TSP tried basil
1g or 1/2 TSP try oregano
2-3 TBPS butter (used to saute the garlic)
5g or 1 TSP salt

I crushed the tomatos using a potato masher while in the pan.  It was very little liquid in this brand of tomatoes anyway, so after about 10 minutes of cooking down the sauce was fairly thick.  Then I put it off to the side for 30 minutes to cool

CONSTRUCTION and COOK
1.  I removed the dough from the fridge after its second rise and gently roll it out you in 18-in diameter circle since I was looking for about 2 in of dough on the sides of the pan

2.  For the cheese, I used 8 oz of whole milk mozzarella (not low moisture), and 8 oz of provolone.  Both shredded instead of sliced.  That was enough cheese to provide a fairly thick loading of cheese across the dough.

3.  Then I applied a layer 1 1/2 pounds of homemade Italian sausage.  It was enough sausage such that when I was done, I did not see any cheese underneath the sausage.

4.  Covered all of the sausage with all the sauce that I made. Like I said earlier, it was pretty thick... and covered the sausage completely

5.  I have a pizza steel in my electric oven at all times, on the very lowest rack position bless.  The oven has five rack positions.  I place the pan in the middle rack a 425° and checked on the crust after 30 minutes

6.  You can see some from the attached photos that I had a little bit of Charing on the top of my crust.  And I peeked at the crust and it was too blonde on the edges.  It's easy to see because the dough pulled away from the edges of the pan

7.  I lowered the pan one position so that it is now on the second to the bottom location in oven, meaning the pizza steel was about 3 inches under the pan.  Then I place a little bit of aluminum foil over the top of the pizza.  Cook for another 10 minutes

8.  Total cook time 40 minutes. Then arrested for another 10 minutes.

9.  Since this was my first attempt, I was having trouble getting the pie out of the pan. I did not want to risk damaging the crust so I sliced it up right inside the pan and served it that way.

[Garvey]

I’m glad people liked it.  If you want your second attempt to be more authentic, ditch the cornmeal and use less dough overall (try 2/3 of what you did here).  Also, don’t cook the sauce.  Cheers!

[T-bone]

I’m glad people liked it.  If you want your second attempt to be more authentic, ditch the cornmeal and use less dough overall (try 2/3 of what you did here).  Also, don’t cook the sauce.  Cheers!

Interesting comment about the dough. I did all of the research and thought I had the right amount.  The dough ball was 911 grams.  I guess I need to improve my research and skills :-)

But after I cut into it and saw the side view, I can see that the dough is very thick. Having never had a real Chicago deep dish slice before ever, I had nothing to compare it to. Some of the dough was like 3/4 of an inch thick.

So yeah, it was good. But I'm sure I can make it better. Thanks for the advice and I'll take it all into consideration on my second attempt.

Edit.
I went back and checked the dough calculator.  It's a nice tool but if I don't set the thickness Factor correctly, then everything is off. So in that regard, it's really a useless tool.  I started with a thickness factor of 0.11 and several folks around here use that sort of thickness factor. For deep dish.

I guess the key question is for a Chicago deep dish pizza, what is the ideal thickness Factor?  Because 0.11 apparently is not it :-)

[RHawthorne]

I'm no expert on this style of pizza, but I do believe you've got it backwards with the butter and oil. Most any recipe for this style I've seen has oil in the dough and butter in the pan, not the other way around like you have it. But maybe some places do it like that. I don't know for sure. Sounds like you already figured out that you used way too much dough. I would say you could cut down on the meat, too, but it's your pizza, so do what you like. I'd say it won't be long before you get it right.

[T-bone]

Okay, apparently I was way off on the dough. 

Working backwards from that list of deep dish recipes, which included btb's malnati with 15% semolina, and he had a 9 inch deep dish size, it looks like his thickness Factor was 0.082.  I assumed straight sided pan and 2 in of dough straight up sides since that's what I have.

Using that thickness factor, and a 14-in pan, I should have had 382.5 grams of flour (assumes zero cornmeal) and not 490 grams (450 plus 40 cornmeal).

As for cutting in the butter, that's a technique to help  get a flaky crust.  I did use two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil in the pan even though I didn't really need to.

[RHawthorne]

Okay, apparently I was way off on the dough. 

Working backwards from that list of deep dish recipes, which included btb's malnati with 15% semolina, and he had a 9 inch deep dish size, it looks like his thickness Factor was 0.082.  I assumed straight sided pan and 2 in of dough straight up sides since that's what I have.

Using that thickness factor, and a 14-in pan, I should have had 382.5 grams of flour (assumes zero cornmeal) and not 490 grams (450 plus 40 cornmeal).

As for cutting in the butter, that's a technique to help  get a flaky crust.  I did use two tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil in the pan even though I didn't really need to.

I know what the butter is for, but in my experience, that only works with non-yeasted baked goods, like biscuits. And speaking of yeast, I don't know where you got this recipe or if you calculated it yourself, but I didn't notice before how much yeast you're using. By my standards, that is an absurd amount; way more than you would ever need for this style of dough. You've got enough yeast in there to make at least five times that amount of dough, no joke. I don't know how long you're letting your dough rise, but even a quick rise dough doesn't need that much, believe me. Plus with that much butter (24% by my calculations), you are seriously slowing down any gluten development you would get anyway. The yeast just can't breathe with that much heavy fat in the mix. Fermentation isn't everything with this style of dough anyway; it doesn't need a long rise. But if you're going for a quick rise, you're not helping yourself with that much butter in the dough. Try using it in the pan instead and see what kind of results you get. That's my 2 cents' worth.

[T-bone]

I know what the butter is for, but in my experience, that only works with non-yeasted baked goods, like biscuits. And speaking of yeast, I don't know where you got this recipe or if you calculated it yourself, but I didn't notice before how much yeast you're using. By my standards, that is an absurd amount; way more than you would ever need for this style of dough. You've got enough yeast in there to make at least five times that amount of dough, no joke. I don't know how long you're letting your dough rise, but even a quick rise dough doesn't need that much, believe me. Plus with that much butter (24% by my calculations), you are seriously slowing down any gluten development you would get anyway. The yeast just can't breathe with that much heavy fat in the mix. Fermentation isn't everything with this style of dough anyway; it doesn't need a long rise. But if you're going for a quick rise, you're not helping yourself with that much butter in the dough. Try using it in the pan instead and see what kind of results you get. That's my 2 cents' worth.

Got ithe recipe from a site I respect it. It seemed like they have good recipes.  Lesson learned:. Their recipes are really good but definitely not the deep dish pizza recipe :-)

Did some research on fat last night and whoa, I had way too much like you mentioned.

Next time I am gonna use BTB's deep dish recipe that was linked on the page that had 10 plus recipes... the version with 15% semolina (but I might leave it out and use flour in its place).

Don't know why I just didn't use one of the tried and tested recipes from this pizzamaking.com site.

But first things first. This weekend I'm going to use the tried and tested Pizza Hut pan recipe from the pizzamaking.com site.  The 22 oz dough version for a 14-in pan.

Thanks again to the group for the valuable feedback. I made some rookie mistakes. Even though I had the information at my fingertips.

[Garvey]

The dough calculator is helpful, but if you need to know the math behind it--

For thin crust, for example:
12" pie has 113 sq inches (A = π r2)
14" pie has 154 sq inches

So that's 1.36 bigger or smaller from one another.  And this would be a perfectly good enough way to convert between deep dish sizes, too, if needed. 

But if you want to be more precise, you could add in the rim of each:
12" pie's 1" rim is 38 sq inches  (C=π×d) + the 113 sq inches above = 151 sq inches total
14" pie's 1" rim is 44 sq inches + the 154 sq inches above = 198 sq inches total

Which means a factor of 1.31 bigger or smaller from one another.

HTH!
Garvey