Well as a kid from Chicago it was time to try and make Tavern style pizza. I have been eating Tavern style pizza my whole life. I love Chicago Deep dish but it’s not an everyday food, tavern style is.
So I started to doing my research, looked at Peter Reinhardt’s book Pizza Quest. I also like the recipe from Notorious Pie. The key is getting the hydration correct and fat percentages right. So I settled on 54% hydration knowing I was going to cure my crusts to dial up the crisp. It also accounts for the semolina used when the crusts are rolled out. I decided to use J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s room temperature dough curing technique from his Chicago Style pizza video. It looked simple enough and made handling really easy, compared to the higher hydration doughs I typically work with.
So the dough was cold bulk fermented for 1 day, then portioned and cold fermented for 3 days. On day 4 I rolled out the dough into 10 inch pizza crusts about 1/8 of an inch thick and let them cure overnight at room temperature.
On day 5 I topped and baked the crusts at 525 F for about 7 min using a baking steel. Here is the result:
It was very crisp, just what I was trying for and I think it would stand up to a box well. Now I have to work on the sauce and cheese. I used an uncooked sauce and it wasn’t right for this crust, I think it needs to be less sweet and thicker. I used straight Grande low moisture whole milk mozzarella and by itself wasn’t strong enough. This made me think of Joe Beddia of Pizzeria Beddia fame using an aged gouda along with mozzarella (pg. 39 Pizza Camp), I may do the same.
So next up fix the sauce and the cheese blend.
The journey continues.
Father Focaccia: A pizza journey 