The Pizza Thread

TahoeJeff said:

Tonight I made Chicago tavern style pizzas. One with homemade sausage, and pepperoni. The other with giardinera and cheese. They turned out crispy and awesome. 

This looks delicious.  I love the absence of crust on the ends.

tempo_n_groove This looks delicious.  I love the absence of crust on the ends.

It's definitely one of the unique things about this style, and they do it very intentionally. It's important. You can kinda see it on the extreme edge of the pep/sausage pie. If you don't cover the crust with sauce and cheese, the 500F oven will burn that crust. When rolled out, the dough is maybe 1/8 inch thick? 

F Me In The Brain said:

Those look amazing

Wobbie said:

OMG…the juggler is no longer the Pizza King. I can almost taste those…and they taste damn good!

Thank you!

Loujoe said:

Sausage from scratch too. Intense. I'm moving in! I'll be quiet and have a decent record collection.

Don't want the one with giardia. Didn't have my shots.. 

I recommend giving the homemade sausage a shot. Kenji Alt-Lopez has a great recipe. I'll post the link below. If you don't have a meat grinder, you can use a food processor, or if you don't have either, you can make it with ground pork from the supermarket.

Juicy Sweet or Hot Italian Sausage Recipe

As far as the giardinera one goes, I made it because my girlfriend doesn't eat meat, and I still wanted to have some chicago flavor in there. The sauce I made is a little on the sweet side, so the sour tang of the pickled vegetables worked really well.

Loujoe said:

You are King. Thx for the detailed feedback. My butcher can grind up some for me. I'm just into that sausage idea. Kind of hit the wall as to what to do with a nice fatty hunk of pork.

Yeah, making homemade Italian sausage for pizza had never even crossed my mind until I saw a youtube video a few months ago and was like "holy shit. Why have I never thought to do this before?". The recipe calls for 2 lbs of pork, but I couldn't find a 2 lbs pork shoulder. The smallest I could find was a little over 3 lbs. So I had to scale up the recipe. I tried to go for what looked like 20% fat in there. I couldnt tell how close I was exactly, but I just tried to avoid the cuts that looked too lean. I now have 2 lbs in the freezer for future use. 

Another note on the recipe. It calls for 2 Tablespoons of crushed red pepper for 2 lbs. Someone in the comments said that seemed like way too much, and I was kind of inclined to agree. So full disclosure, I used about 1.5 Tablespoons for 3 lbs, and It was pretty good. I might put a little more in next time. Feel free to play around with the spices according to your own personal taste, although you will probably want to keep the salt level according to the recipe, and the article talks about why.