Hi everybody. Welcome to the North
American Pizza and Culinary Academy's YouTube channel. Today in this
episode what we are going to be talking about is Chicago style stuffed pizza.
The stuffed pizzas actually have been around for a very long time. People who know
me best actually know that this is really where I got my beginning in pizza.
So I want to show you what we're going to do here. Very typical is these two-inch,
very heavy pans that we use. This pizza is going to cook inside of a gas deck oven for probably about 20 to 25 minutes, so the pan has to be very heavy
to conduct that kind of heat so that it bakes very evenly.
What I am going to do is, I'm going to start off by putting on a glove.
We're going to have to put some grease inside over here.
What we use is unsalted butter but really this is one of those that wouldn't hurt
even if you used a little bit of margarine or vegetable shortening.
Because some people think that because the butter has the fat solids inside
of it, that it will cause some burning but I'm actually going to show you what we are
going to do to this pizza and we're not going to worry about that at all.
I'm taking a knob of butter just like this and I'm going to spread this around the base of
this pan very evenly. What we're trying to do is really get into those corners
really well because I'm going to finish this pizza in this style of a
very famous pizzeria in Chicago called Pequods. Pequods for those of you who are keeping score here was the the invention of a
gentleman named Burt Katz who unfortunately is no longer with us. But he really left this mark on Chicago and Pizza because what he did was,
he would start his stuffed pizza just like this in the same manner but what he
would do is, he would take some Parmesan cheese and and he would put it inside
the pan and it would stick to the butter. Then what was left over on the exterior of the pizza is this really beautiful layer of caramelized Parmesan which is really good,
it gets really crispy. So this is really what I'm looking to do.
Again we greased the inside of this pan. I put a glove on so that I'm not getting everything all dirty and keep moving along. And then I've got this beautiful
Parmesan cheese from Grande. Grande is a cheese manufacturer here in the midwest, considered to be some of the best cheese in the world, made from cow's milk here in Wisconsin. We're going to
put a good amount of this cheese inside of here just like this.
From here anybody who has ever put flour in a cake pan, before you put a cake
inside, we're going to use that same technique where I'm going to start rolling
around this cheese and what it's going to do is, it's going to stick to the
bottom of this pan. By doing this, when I get ready to put my dough in the
pan, this will already be prepared and then we'll just go ahead we'll stick the
dough inside over there and then we'll get ready to fill it.
This particular pizza that I'm making here today is a 14 inch pizza.
So this is a very big stuffed pizza that we're making. In Chicago you can find
them in a lot bigger sizes than this. Some guys do 16", I've even seen 18".
Back in the day, back in 2008, I actually competed in the World
Championships in Parma (Italy) and I had a custom-made 22 inch pan where the
slices were almost 12 inches big. It was a really cool thing.
So I got this pan that's prepared. Now you could see inside over here I got
that cheese that's adhered to the butter. From here now, I'm going to make some room.
I've got my dough balls ready to go. Let me show you what we are going to do here.
Now you can see these got a good amount of volume to these dough balls. Typically the Chicago style pizza, you
would probably see this done maybe on a sheet pan, the dough balls would be stored
on a sheet pan. We're going to take these out just like this. And I'm going to tell you what we are going to do. Give us a little bit of a stretch. We get this to the point where we're going to get this go into this machine. Now this
machine is called a dough sheeter. Very typical equipment
for what we would see here in Chicago. Almost all the Chicago style pizzas are
passed through a machine that's similar to this. This is a famous company that's
no longer in (the sheeter) business anymore called Anet's or Anet's <?>. In its
time, this was one of the consider one of the best machines to use. This is a double
pass roller. Inside this machine are the stainless steel rollers top and bottom.
Then we've got adjustments that are done independently here on the side so
that we can adjust the thickness of this dough going through the machine.
It's going to be loud. We're going to get this going right now.
I'm going to make sure I got enough flour on this because we don't want it to stick.
I turn the machine on {machine noise}
The dough goes in the top, goes into the machine. We want to be careful that the dough doesn't stick inside over here. You also want to be careful that you don't stick your fingers in here either. That's not a good thing. I've seen plenty of accidents happen back in the day with these. You always want to be careful when you do this. I'm going to pass this through the second roller which is going to go even thinner on this dough sheet. And you're going to see, we're going to stretch this beautiful sheet of dough now. This is what gives that characteristic look of the Chicago pizza, kind of looking almost like a biscuit almost. From here I'm
going to just gently kind of lay this into the pan and I'm going to go back and
forth kind of like when you put your bed sheet you make your bed in the morning
you give it a good shake and it kind of goes where he needs to go and then I'm
going to start putting this into the pan working my way around okay and I'm
pulling the doughll a little bit and then letting it drop into the corners. Tthis is
going to give me a really good result because what's going to happen if I do
this running that dough doesn't need to stretch anymore we've got it the
right size on the machine and then this is going to give us this beautiful base
like we're building a pie almost anybody's ever made an apple pie a fruit
pie anything like that so this is going to go just like this. from here now
what I'm going to do I'm going to take you over to our bench and I want to fill
this with the cheese this is the part of the Chicago style pizza that everybody
else in the pizza eating world goes crazy about how much cheese goes into a
pizza like this let's take a walk I'm going to bring my Parmesan with me too. This is what they call the East Coast blend. This is a blend of whole milk and
part-skim mozzarella this is very high quality cheese here alright we're going to
probably use every bit a two and a half to three pounds of cheese to fill this
up so considering that we're using a very high quality cheese the
payoff is going to be when we cut into this pizza I'll probably be able to
stand on the roof with the cheese pull of this thing so we're going to go ahead
and we're gonna start to fill this up inside and again really what we're
trying to do is keep this cheese separated. One of the great things about
Grande is that when you buy their cheese shredded already like this they don't
add anything in there like cellulose or any kind of
anti-caking agent so again the nice thing about this cheese is once it cools
down and you have a little bit of this pizza left over the next day you can
actually rewarm this pizza and guess what the cheese is going to pull really
nice again it's going to melt and you'll be able to stretch it really beautifully
what we do is we take the pinch we give it a little jiggle like this and we can
kind of give it your one eye and see that we got enough cheese and it's
pretty much what we're going to do here from here what I'm going to do we're going
to go back to the sheeter because now this needs one more layer of dough. Come on with me. This is a style of pizza that's for many generations I I know for a fact
I've been making pizzas all my life and it was here way before me so this is a
style that goes back usually easily 50 60 years. I've got some friends
of mine in the city who have a pizzerias that are at least that old making this style of pizza. One thing I want to mention about my
dough balls. All my dough balls are the same size. These are ten ounce dough balls. The
reason I do them all ten ounces is because not only now do I have some kind
of consistent weight in all my dough balls, I don't have to make a lot of
different sizes. What I'm going to do is put these together and
based on the size of the pizza I can take two balls and put them together
three balls and put them together I'm making the lid not right now which is
one and a half balls on a 14-inch pizza is what I'm using we're passing through
this machine anyway which is going to make it really nice and flat and smooth
so this is going to be a really easy way for you to maintain some consistency if
you're doing this in a pizzeria or even at home, if you are doing this at home as well. I'm going to use the same setting of the machine make sure we have enough flour go back into the machine
the idea is that we don't want is much dough in the top of this as we do in the
bottom because the thicker this dough is on the top the more likely it's going to
be a more under baked, it's not going to bake all the way through, it will look rubbery or doughy on a table and people don't usually like that. So I'm going to kind of bring this over like this before I put this on I always give myself a
little insurance policy to make sure that these two layers stick I got a
pastry brush just like this give it a little bit of water not a lot
and I'm just going to go right around the edge here on the border by doing
this little bit of water we're creating a surface now that's going to be a
little bit tacky so when I go to put the pizza on the second layer a dull on the
top layer again we're really confident that it's going to adhere really nicely and
it's going to seal again just like a pie. This pizza is derived from an old
Sicilian type of pizza, pizza rustica. they would call it or pizza <?> you might hear this referred to. we would tell traditionally in the
southern part of Italy you'd have something like this around the Easter
holiday and this would be filled up with with all kinds of eggs and cheese and
sausage and there's a lot of different things they put this on inside of them
I've even seen this done with the escarole greens you know and a
lot of things like that so this is a something that that really dates back to
Italy and in southern Italy in particular you can see now I got this
top layer of dough that I put on and what I'm doing is I'm working my fingers all
the way around the sides to ensure that I've got a really good seal around this
what this is going to do now by sealing it in this method once we cut the excess
trim off of this you're not going to be able to see anymore the lines of the two
pieces of dough stuck together the last thing that's really important I want you
to see this I put one hole in the middle to start on this is going to let any
excess steam come out because if we seal this too tightly the top like she blow
up like a balloon and all the salad sauce will end up
out of it so what we're going to do is I'm going to just pinch a couple holes
all the way around and I'm going to make these kind of like ventilation holes all
right and the steam is going to be able to come out of here from here let's go
back to the bench and we're going to finish this I've got just a regular
sharp knife and I'm going to go against the edge of the pan just like this all
the way around and you can see how nice and even this cuts away all right we got
this scrap dough that we're not going to throw that over no we're going to roll
it back up and we're going to reuse this so I got this dough like this and you would
see guys in a in a pizza or in Chicago typically making like this kind of this
jelly roll kind of swirls cinnamon roll you know whatever you want to call this
little thing like this and then this will go back in the dough box and would get reused. The idea being though is that we've got these two layers of dough
now that are on top of each other crimped we're stuck to the sides of the
pan because we're adhering to that butter okay and now what I'm going to do
is that timer I actually have two pizzas there's a couple pieces of equipment
that are very important right this is called a pan gripper. We hold this,
goes onto the side of the pan and it gives us the ability to hold on to the
pan very tightly so we're going to take the pan gripper and a long spatula And we're going to come out just like this. and I'm going to put this right here. I'm going to take another one
and put this right next to it. And then we're going to come back to this. I'm going to give you a couple secrets here, a couple call-outs. You can see how beautiful this already is.
Let's pop these out of the pan and
come on up from this side I'm going to show you how we finish this here and
then we're going to go back to finishing our paper so I take this like this right
we get a cardboard circle there's a 14-inch pizza so I got a 14-inch
cardboard circle on the side okay I want to get underneath the pizza like this
and I'm just going to pull it out now you can see how beautiful I was pulling this
that beautiful cheese crust is all nice and caramelized and golden brown our
sauce is really nice and baked why don't you come over here and I'm going to show
you how we did this all right so the first thing I'm going to do, I've got this pizza just like this. We got our cheese everything else is inside and then I've
got this beautiful tomato sauce. This is from a company called Greci.
Polpachef, this is a sweet beautiful tomato pulp that comes from Parma
Italy. All I did was I added for everyone can of this, I add about 35
grams of sea salt. Now I'm going to go ahead I'm going to give this a quick stir and I
want to go ahead and I'm going to put about four scoops of sauce on top of this so
if you imagine that we've got about three pounds of cheese inside I've got
20 plus another 30 and half so I got about 35 ounces of dough total inside
over here not only putting all this sauce so you can see this is something
that's made to hold up to the inside of this up in that long bake time all right
once I got the sauce I give it a shake like this and it goes on very smooth
very easy okay then the last thing that we do the last
signature I take some of this great Parmesan cheese from Grande and we give
this a little swirl on top just like that for a little color all right
this again is going to go now into my oven for 20 minutes 25 minutes
something like that we're baking at a temperature of 480 degrees this is a gas
oven, a gas deck oven by a company named Cupponi. Cupponi comes from Italy. It's a brand new oven running on gas it's not the typical electric oven that you
would see so this is a consistent chamber similar to our deck ovens here
in the United States and then what we're going to do is let me take this last one
out over here and I want to show you how we're going to finish this right so we
going to get my pan gripper I'm going to come back to the side just like this get my
spatula and again I'm just going to get underneath this and you can see again we've got that
beautiful crust of cheese all the way around this pizza. This was one of
those those beautiful innovations we don't see a lot anymore
you know with this type of innovation work but when Burt did this first one at
Pequod's people went crazy and still to this day it's one of the most popular
styles of Chicago stuffed pizza that we see the cut is really cool the cut is
one of those if we come down with this giant machete knife just like this we
cut down into it I'm gonna cut this on the side just down like this and you
could already see that that cheese wants to ooze out of this right now and then
the best part of all is that cheese pull let's see if we can get this to pull
really nice out of here. Oh look at that baby we could pull this all the way to
the roof that's my favorite right there so everybody thank you very much for
joining us today if you want to catch this class in action we actually do a
beautiful Chicago style pizza class here we spend a whole day talking Chicago
thin crust the cracker style the tavern pizza this deep-dish the stuffed pizza
we really get into the nuts and bolts of Chicago pizza so if you haven't checked
out our website please visit us at www.pizzaculinaryacademy.com You can also check us out on social media by searching @pizzaculinaryacademy. If you haven't registered for a class, we hope to see you very soon. Thank you everybody for joining us.
Is this the NY Pizza Academy or the Pizza Academy of New York? I have a receipt test i need to study for
Weirdly getting strong John candy/uncle buck vibes from this dude
Actual Chicago resident here. Deep dish/stuffed is something you eat like two or three times a year or when you have family/friends visiting from out of state. Like 99% of the pizza you get from non-chain places in the city and the burbs is thin crust (aka tavern style) cut into squares like the guy in the video mentioned.
If I'm going for this style I generally go for deep dish over stuffed, which doesn't have that extra layer of crust between the cheese and the sauce. Pequod's is the best for this style, but Lou Malnati's isn't bad.
He said 4 tomato sauce scoops.. Then he put in 5.
that cheese pull at the end. so satisfying
You can call it what you want.. but you cant call that shit pizza...
It's a cornbread biscuit which you've melted cheese on and then, in defiance of God and man and all things holy, you poured uncooked marinara sauce atop the cheese. Atop! The cheese on top, the sauce naked, cold, on display like some sort of sauce whore.
Where do you get a pizza sword like that?
Is this style of pizza meant to be shared? I just can't fathom eating all that dough, sauce and THREE POUNDS of cheese in one meal. Insane.