Deep-dish pizza

Oh dear. Just looking at these photos again makes my stomach grumble. I have to confess: I had to grab a bite to eat between editing the photos and writing this entry.

This pizza pie I made on the second day of 2011. Granted, I have never tasted Chicago-style pizza in Chicago or anywhere in the US, so I can't make comparisons with the real thing. But I do have a deep-dish pizza favorite: when we go to a Finnish chain restaurant Rosso, it's not uncommon that I pick their deep-dish pizza. I find it delicious and worth choosing over and over again. This has been my best try at trying to  create the same taste experience at home. This was everything a deep-dish pizza in my opinion should be: soft and pie-like in the middle, generously topped, cheese meltingly delicious and the base providing just enough crunch.

I found this recipe from a Finnish food blog, the author of which had picked it up from a Finnish magazine years ago. I was a little surprised the dough contained no other oil than what was used for greasing, but this recipe really works like a charm. These pictures are from my second time I made it.

Base:

200 ml / a scant cup of water
1 tsp sugar
3/4 tsp salt
ca 450 ml / almost 2 cups flour
3 tsp active dry yeast

vegetable oil for greasing the dish

Mix together the flour, dry yeast, salt and sugar. Add the 42 C / 108 F temperatured water and knead the dough until the texture is smooth. Let rise under a towel until the size doubles.

Pat the risen dough into the greased dish. Add the tomato sauce and chosen toppings.

Bake in the lowest part of the oven in 250 C / 500 F for about 15 minutes.

This kind of pizza is also very fulfilling so you don't need to eat as much of it to be full than with a regular thin-crust pizza.

This to me looks just right. This is how I like my deep-dish pizza!

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Pizza on a flat bread base

Yesterday we made a whole new kind of experiment. The Great Pizza Lovers decided not to make the dough with their traditional way, but to put together to favorites: pizza and the Finnish flat bread. So the base was to be made with a recipe taken from another Finnish blogger, Jenni. This pizza is ideal for busy days when you arrive home starving, the base is done in matter of seconds. The food was tasty, different than usually but very good. The flavors of the toppings were more dominant with this different base.

Base:
3 ml of cold water
½ tsp of salt
5 dl of barley flour

Mix together and spread the mixture on top of a baking sheet covered with baking paper. Make is as thin as possible. When spreading the base I used a fair amount of flour.

Tomato sauce:
70 g of tomate puré
½ dl of water
1 tsp of sugar
½ tsp of salt
½ tsp of dried oregano

Mixed together and heated in a saucepan.

I baked the pizza in the hottest possible temperature my oven could give me, in other words 275 C, for about 12 minutes.

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Pizza

My favorite food would be pizza. With that in mind, I feel there is no need to explain this entry more.

This time, however, we tried a new recipe to make the base. In a Finnish-Swedish lifestyle program called Strömsö, the chef Paul got his much wanted stone-oven in a late-September episode and the first food done in the oven was pizza. With his dough we made our pizzas in the beginning of last week. Our intention was to follow his intructions regarding baking as well, so in other words first bake the base first only with tomato sauce, then put in the rest of the fillings and let it bake a little bit more, but we were so hungry that we didn't do that, we just put on the fillings and baked the pizzas once.


25 g of yeast (I used dried yeast)
250 ml of warm water
500 g of flour
½ tsp of sugar
½ tsp of salt
4 tbl of olive oil

This dough needs to be kneaded properly. I kneaded it a good while on the table before making a big ball out of it and placing it into the fridge to wait for the cooking part. After a couple of hours I moulded the dough with my hands to an appropriate size, filled it with yummy things and cooked it in a hot oven.

The photo is taken on the next day and this is indeed the best re-warmed pizza so far.

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