How to Make Real Chicago Thin-Crust Pizza at Home | Kenji’s Cooking Show

hey bud it's Kenji uh we're gonna make some Chicago thin crust pizza I'm going to start by talking to this camera here though a little bit different from my normal videos tell me what you think um so this is a recipe I've been working on if you follow my Instagram uh you'll know I've been working on this recipe for literally months um have made hundreds of versions of it um spoke with dozens of experts visited Chicago once you we went to 12 pizzerias in uh two days and spoke to a lot of pizza makers out there so a lot of research went into helping sort of uh translate this style of pizza for home cooks and luckily it is very easy to make at home which is really nice it takes a little bit of time you know there's there's a few steps where you have to put things aside and let them sit for a while but the total amount of active work that you do in here is very minimal and if you look at the the length of this video that's about how much work you're gonna have to actually put into uh making this pizza so it's not too much so what is Chicago thin crust so Chicago thin crust or Midwest Midwest thin crust I should say is a style of pizza that's very thin cut into squares originally developed in Chicago at a place called The Home Run and according to historian Steve journalist Steve balinski but it very quickly spread to other taverns so like old speakeasies that started serving food in order to attract customers places like Vito and Nyx in the south side which I visited and I spent a lot of time with rose George who's the current owner she's the third generation she's the granddaughter of uh of veto um and actually her grandchildren now are working in the kitchen so there's five the fifth generation of that family are now making the same style of pizza as they happen since 1945. um at Vito NYX the way they do it is they start with a ball of dough uh they run it through a sheeter which is essentially like a industrial rolling pin that you don't want to get your fingers stuck in they run at their sheeter to get it very very thin they top it they cover it with cheese various toppings very common in Chicago is sausage because the union stockyards in South Chicago used to be right there and so sausage you know was as cheap as water back then but the top it with sausage or other toppings and then bake it in the deck oven that runs at about 500 to 550 degrees and this is true of most of these Chicago think rest places and most of the crust places around the Midwest um by the way before you get offended at me calling the Chicago style um this specific recipe is for a Chicago style pizza so there are variations of thin crust that spread from Chicago throughout the Midwest and developed into their sort of own Regional Specialties um I don't mean to offend anyone it's just you know I I'm doing specifically Chicago style if you like another style of thin crust cool I like it I probably will like it too and yeah going back so one of the things that makes this pizza great for home Cooks is that it does bake at a lower temperature than other Pizza Styles so Neapolitan or New York style pizza would bake much hotter so it was like 750 for New York or even 900 degrees Fahrenheit for Neapolitan um they make much quicker whereas the Chicago style pizza bakes in about 10 minutes as opposed to you know one minute to four minutes um another thing that makes this really easy is there's a step in this process called curing the dough which is really like this sort of mind-blowing technique I've never seen before that makes it really easy uh to make at home you know one of the big problems I find that people have with making pizza at home is launching the pizza off the peel once they've topped it that it often gets stuck even it even happens to me you know I've been making pizza my first job is making pizza I've been making pizza for over 20 years but I still sometimes get pizzas stuck to the pizza peel so Chicago Pizza Chicago style thin crust is as long as you do the curing step that is guaranteed not to happen so I'll show you how that all works as well um all right so enough talking um I'm going to start cooking and I'll continue to talk as I cook so from here on out everything is basically going to be in real time minus the brakes so from here to the end of the video that's how long this pizza will take to make you all right so here we go so we're starting with flour I'm using uh bread flour you know so relatively high protein bread flour which is going to give it a little more structure but you can do this with all-purpose flour um it'll come out just fine so I'm going to start with 300 grams of flour which is enough to make two 14 inch pizzas you do need a 14 inch pizza stone or steel to be able to do a 14 inch pizza if you don't you can make a smaller Pizza like a 12 inch pizza which you can bake like on the back of a cast iron skill overturned cast iron skillet or even an overturned aluminum sheet tray but I am going to assume that you have a baking steel when I'm I'm making this by the way below there is a recipe link um this is a recipe that I've been working on for I just published in the New York Times uh in March so there is a recipe link and I will put a link below um okay so I'm using a scale I have 300 grams of flour the reason I'm using a scale is because flour is extremely compressible which means that depending on how hard it's packed one cup of flour can weigh anywhere between around four ounces to six ounces you know so that's like a 50 difference it's a huge difference and will make a big difference in your dough so anytime you're baking you do want to use a scale um so all right so flour now I'm going to add salt I want to add 2.5 percent of the weight of the flour in salt here so 300 grams of flour 2.5 percent of that is 7.5 so I'm going to add 7.5 grams of salt these numbers I'm talking about are what are called Baker's percentages it's how you know Bakers calculate their does and how they scale dough all right that's about seven and a half right there we're gonna add the same amount of sugar seven and a half percent sorry seven and a half uh grams and then we're gonna add a very small amount of yeast so you can go down actually as low as like you know Kim's uncle they use point one percent yeast I use about point five percent so that's about 1.5 grams because I find it to be a little bit more uh predictable when you're using a supermarket yeast and Supermarket ingredients that aren't quite as consistent as what you can get at restaurants but this is just instant yeast my scale doesn't is not precise enough to tell me 1.5 grams but you know it says two grams close enough now the next ingredient is oil so in neapolitan pizza dough there is no oil in New York pizza dough times is a little bit of olive oil this recipe has quite a bit of oil and it's actually really important to getting that sort of crispy crackery crust um oil prevents flour proteins from binding so it'll prevent gluten from forming uh in your dough and that's what's going to keep it uh instead of turning sort of leathery and tough it'll keep your dough really sort of light and crisp so we're going to add 10 I've seen recipes that go up to 15 oil so 10 is 30 grams of oil this is light olive oil right now that I have in this bottle but you can use corn oil you can use vegetable oil um basically any kind of sort of relatively neutral oil will work and the last ingredient is water so this dough one of the other big differences in this dough oh I got my little mushroom log soaking in here in this dough versus say a New York style dough or a new Paladin dough you know New York or Neapolitan dough generally hovers at around 60 hydration give or take um sometimes I like to do it a little bit more hydration than that up to sort of maybe 65 percent this dough is much lower so around 50 hydration so for every 100 grams of flour only 50 grams of water so it's a very dry dough so I'm going to add 150 grams of water here uh so the lower the hydration in a dough in general um the stiffer it's going to be obviously but as it bakes you know a very highly hydrated dough is going to come out sort of chewy and open and moist so like if you think about the inside of a loaf of like sourdough bread you know where it's very chewy and moist whereas a lower hydration dough with more fat is going to come out less chewy and lighter and more crisp so if you think about like the texture of like brioche which is much more tender than a dough that has um uh less fat in it so what we're trying to do is use the minimal amount of hydration we can to get this dough together so right now we're at 50 and I tested this a bunch you know uh if you go much lower than 50 the dough becomes virtually impossible to um knead and roll out so 50 is what we're going with all right so I got a stand mixer if you don't have a stand mixer you can use a food processor just put it in there and uh let the food processor run um until uh the dough forms a ball that starts sort of riding around the blade and after that step let it ride around the blade for about 30 seconds and then pop it out and you have your ready dough if you don't have either a food processor or a stand mixer you can of course do this by hand you just need a uh put it all in a mixing bowl gather it all together until it forms a Shaggy ball then put it onto a clean board or countertop and just knead it by hand for you know 10 minutes or so all right so I'm going to let this come together into a dough I'm running at speed you know two maybe three on here I'm gonna let it come together into a dough and and let it knead for about 10 minutes so I will see you in 30 seconds or so I lied so what I'm actually doing is I'm going to let this dough come into a sort of Shaggy ball right which is basically the stage right now as long as there's no like not a lot of sort of dry flour remaining we're good so I'm gonna pop this out here I'm just gonna move the dough around grab up that extra stuff along the edges so it's all Incorporated now what I'm going to do is I'm going to let this sit here um I'll cover it just so it doesn't dry out I'll cover it with a bowl like this and I'm going to let that sit for 10 minutes in order for the dough to sort of for the flour to really hydrate and start to start to relax which will make the kneading process actually a little bit faster all right so now I will be back in 10 minutes or so okay so our dough is hydrated and I'm going to knead it now so if you did the math starting with 150 grams of flour uh per ball of dough you're going to end up with about 250 grams of dough total per Pizza um so that's exactly what we're looking for 250 grams is for a 14 inch pizza if you want to make a smaller Pizza like a 12 inch say you don't have a big enough pizza stone to do this um you can scale everything down in order to do that and uh and if you follow the links in the description below the recipe the printed recipe that I provided actually does have scaled down versions as well if you want to make a 12 inch pizza instead for whatever reason but okay so now I'm I'm mixing it at a speed about I don't know two or three um so I'm gonna let this mix now by the way if you do it in the food processor you don't have to do that whole pre-hydration step you can just run the processor and it'll work fine if you do it by hand letting it pre-hydrate like I did letting it rest for about 10 minutes before kneading actually will help as well make it a little bit easier to need but now I'm going to let this knead for five minutes so I will be back in five minutes all right so this is what our dough looks like pretty smooth and supple all right which is what we want um [Music] now what we're going to do so if you want to make this pizza on the same day you can divide the stone half because we made enough for two pieces divide the dough in half ball it up let it rise in bowls in oiled bowls until they're about doubled in volume it should take a few hours you can make them at least get to the curing process on the same day but the pizza will come out significantly better if you let it ferment in the fridge for three to five days five days is better you know this is something that I sort of discovered accidentally when I accidentally left some dough over proofing on the counter because I had to go pick up my kids from uh I can't remember what it was school something but um essentially what happens is dough over proofs you know for something like a sourdough bread you don't want to overproof the dough because what happens with when dough over proofs is that as it gets more acidic the gluten starts to break down and eventually the dough loses all its structure so instead of puffing up and inflating nicely stay the way like a nice neapolitan pizza crust the rim wheel it just goes flat which is not a good thing in most bread products but in a uh this style of pizza thin and crispy pizza you do want it to stay flat so letting it over ferment is actually not just not bad it's actually pretty good so we're gonna let our dough ferment for five days and the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to put them in a bowl here put them in a little bit of oil I've got these Deli containers if you don't have good Deli containers you can use you know Ziploc bags you can use bowls with a plastic wrap on them whatever whatever you got you just want to make sure they're in a container that's large enough to let them rise they might not rise at all which is fine um because they're going to be going real slow in the fridge but uh you want them big enough to let them Rise by at least double in volume just in case all right so I'm going to cover these up I'm going to wash my hands and then I'm going to stick these in the fridge and they're going to be in the fridge for five days and so that's all the active time today and I will see you in four days all right so it's been four days since my Dough's in the fridge um you see I actually had two I'm sorry I already rolled out one of them but I'm gonna show you how I'm Gonna Roll Out the second um four days is about um you know I'd say a minimum of three days is what you want uh as far as fermentation goes um three to five days is ideal so this is four days you can go a little longer if you want you can rush it if you want but three to five days is ideal so four days later you can see it hasn't risen really that much um and it's totally fine if it doesn't rise at all this is not like a normal dough where you're gonna expect to see like say you know a doubling in volume or whatever over a certain period the cold fermentation and the relatively low amount of yeast and the low hydration means that it may or may not rise quite a bit but either way it's fine for this style of dough so now this is the point where with a New Yorker you know need a paladin style pizza you're gonna have to stretch it by hand um you know the beauty of this crust is that you get to use a rolling pin which is a much you know much lower part barrier to entry um so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna I've got semolina on my board you could also use cornmeal if you want um regular flour works fine too um I find semolina gives a little bit more sort of crunch in the in the texture of the finished crust um and so what I'm doing is I'm just gonna start with my rolling pin and rotate a little bit between each roll just to kind of get it going all right and once it starts to get a little bigger I'm going to start going at 12 o'clock 10 30. and 130 so you know straight up and down and then at a 45 degree angle either way and continue to kind of rotate the dough as I do that so we get a nice even Circle and what we're aiming for is 14 inches here so you can use a rolling pin sorry a tape measure you know if you have one or if you uh you know if you have a piece of paper and a compass you can draw a 14 inch circle and match it up to the circle instead to the dough and see if you're up there I like to use I have this 14 inch Wok lid so I'm just going to compare it to the size of there and see how far out I have to go still got a ways to go I'm using this tapered uh French style rolling pin you can use um you know I like this kind of rolling pin because I feel like the taper lets you have a little more control so if I want to get just the edge for example I can roll it here and the rest of this is angled up so only that edge is going to get a little bit thinned out you see that's one of the advantage of this advantages of this French style but you can use a straight rolling pin you know more of an American style um you know your classic chasing after the uh you know Looney Tunes cartoon chasing after the mouse style rolling pin if you want um you could you know I've done this with a wine bottle before an empty wine bottle or a full wine bottle uh that will soon be empty that works fine too it really really doesn't matter what you use as long as you can get it out to a 14 inch circle 14 ish I think we're almost there see where we are let's say another half inch or so when we're there I'm Gonna Roll this just slightly bigger than that pot lid so it overhangs it just a little bit on every side that way during the curing step which we're about to do next as it rests if it shrinks at all if it pulls back at all it'll still end up thin and big enough okay I think we're just about there let's give it one more check the touch more and we're good so this right now is basically a 14 inches I'm getting it like just a hair more foreign so now here's the interesting part of the recipe and this is the thing that I learned how to do from uh John Carruthers uh and the folks at Kim's Uncle over in Chicago a method that was actually pioneered by um cats the pizzeria Pats um on the south side of Chicago in the 1970s is when this technique was developed created uh and it's still used today by several places including including pads um so what we're doing is we're going to cure the dough and what that basically means is we're just going to let it rest uncovered so I've got this piece of dough here all right already done I'm gonna get the second one out from there so I have parchment paper all right we're gonna lay the dough in the parchment paper like that and then we're just gonna let it sit we're not going to touch it gonna let it sit overnight um and in that time it's going to dry out I'll probably just move this somewhere so it's not in the middle but just to show you right now how I'm doing it I'll move it somewhere and then move it back here but you know you can find a shelf you can find a table top anything where it's not going to be disturbed uh for the next you know 12 to 18 hours or so even 24 hours is fine uh completely uncovered don't put anything on top of it don't put any plastic wrap nothing just leave it just like this all right so I will see you tomorrow or today as it were all right so here we go so the dough has dried out you can see it it's kind of like it's like leather you know it cracks a little bit on the edges that's okay um so yeah that's exactly what you want your dough to look like at this point if you want by the way you can freeze it freeze it flat if you want but we're going to continue on so this is the top side the top side is going to be a little bit drier than the bottom side obviously so what's going to happen is at the top side will become the bottom of the pizza so I'm going to add a little bit of a little bit more semolina there you can do cornmeal bread crumbs um I have my oven preheated to 500 Degrees and I have a um a baking Steel in there actually it's a food lab branded baby steel um I have a baking Steel in there you can also use a baking stone um or if you don't you have either of those you can overturn a sheet tray and put that in your oven and it'll work not quite as well as with a stone but it'll work just fine all right so I got my pizza peel so this skin is going to go over drier side down just like that okay now we're going to start topping so the sauce I'm using this is a homemade sauce I will give you a link to the recipe for this it's essentially made with canned tomatoes tomato paste a bunch of dried herbs like oregano marjoram um you know you can just use something like this Italian seasoning that's fine fresh garlic and granulated garlic because I like that flavor you know they have two different flavors it's not that one is better than the other so they have two different flavors fresh versus granulated so this sauce has a little bit of both if you don't want to make your own sauce you can just use any kind of um you know canned Jarred pizza sauce will be fine you know unlike a like a New York style pizza or a Neapolitan style pizza typically is made you know some New York sauces are cooked but very frequently you'll find New York sauces are nothing but canned tomatoes that are uh pureed with just a little bit of salt sometimes a little bit of you know maybe a little bit of garlic but typically you know just Tomatoes Salt maybe a little bit of olive oil same with Neapolitan pizzas just going to be canned tomatoes that are puree not cooked you know obviously gets cooked when it goes into the can so canned tomatoes are always cooked to some degree but not cooked any longer whereas Chicago style pizza sauce um is going to be more of a cook style sauce with other herbs and Seasonings aromatics it'll be cooked down so it's a little sort of more Savory although it very often also has quite a bit of sugar and I think depending on where you are in Chicago you know like the South Side Chicago pizza joints we'll have a relatively sweet sauce whereas the north side ones less so but you do it to taste you know I like a little bit of sugar in mine I like a little bit of vinegar in mine so you can you can control sort of the acid and the sweetness yourself all right so you see we're putting sauce all the way to the edges here all right no rim on this kind of pizza and that was about I'd say I don't know three quarters of a cup of sauce something like that all right so I've got now freshly grated mozzarella this is full fat low moisture mozzarella um sometimes I find depending on what Market you're in you know can be a little bit hard to find the full fat stuff it's fine to use uh you know part skin low moisture mozzarella and what you don't want to do is use fresh mozzarella which is what goes on like a neapolitan pizza this is the type of cheese you would use on a New York style pizza you know um Parts game is fine uh full Fat's gonna work better I think it has better flavor it melts better but you know like Kim's not Kim's uncle but Vito and Nyx uses a part skim and they have one of the best pizzas of this style in the world if not the best so you know if it's good enough for Rose it's good enough for me you can even do pre-shred I've done it with pre-shred and it works fine you know it won't it won't stretch quite as nicely because pre-shredded cheese has a cellulose added to keep it from clumping together uh but it'll do in a pinch all right now we got sausage so this sausage is homemade uh Chicago style sausage which is sort of heavily seasoned with uh fennel toasted fennel black pepper there's some garlic in there some Italian seasoning dried you know dried herbs and obviously salt and then it's just ground pork shoulder it's very easy to make the style of sausage at home and again I will include a recipe Link in the description below that said if you don't want to make your own sausage that's fine too just buy it you can buy Italian sausage um you know the Italian sausage you buy at the supermarket you know whatever it is whatever brand you get is probably going to be different from uh you know real Chicago style Italian sausage um Supermarket Italian sausage tends to be I find a little more sort of heavily seasoned and a little less fennel forward sometimes a little bit sweeter but it'll still taste just fine all right so I'm using about uh by the way that was about that was about a half pound of mozzarella I'm also using about a half pound of sausage you know like I mentioned um or I think I mentioned earlier the other day that sausage is really sort of the uh most common uh Chicago meat topping in the rest of the country is pepperoni in Chicago it's sausage and it's all because uh where this style of pizza was created south side of Chicago used to be where the union Stockyards are and so they processed a lot of uh pigs down there made a lot of sausage and so the sausage was extremely cheap to make in Dubai and so a lot of these people you know so it just became sort of like the default topping for this style of pizza what's really nice is that um you know the sausage kinda melts is the sausage as the sausage Cooks like the fat kind of melts out and it mingles with the cheese and so you get that kind of fennelly Porky cured pork flavor um sort of permeating the entire pizza and so it really becomes like an essential part uh it achieves a is what is my my friend Ed Levine would say it achieves a sort of cosmic Oneness with the rest of the pie all right I think that's probably good let me get my hands a good rinse a little bit of a mess here because we were just trying to feed my toddler lunch before his nap in fact you might hear him making noise upstairs because I think my wife is trying to put him put him down right now and he's uh he's in one of those refusing to nap moods okay now the last top I'm going to put on here is this uh hot jardinera so I got mine from uh JP graciano I will leave a link below for where you can order this um which you do want to do is find jardiner packed in oil which is the Chicago style I've seen you know like other other brands that you buy at the supermarket might come packed in a brine you don't want to use brine pack jardinera because um it will make the pizza soggy you need oil packed and you need to drain it really well so all I did was I dumped out that jar into a strainer um and that's it now I'm gonna kind of put it all over Jordan Air by the way is a uh it's a mixture of pickled vegetables so it'll have like pickled carrots cauliflower celery sometimes it'll have fennel um and if you get it sometimes olives chopped in there if you get it hot it'll also have um either serrano peppers or sport peppers in there but it is the um it's not you know in the 40s they weren't putting jardiniera on Pizza uh jardiner is the uh traditional accompaniment for a Chicago uh Italian beef sandwich but most pizzerias these days will have a uh a jardinera option as a topping and I think jardinera and sausage are really kind of what makes a flavor combination that really pops you know spicy pickled it goes nicely against that rich sausage okay oh I so sometimes I would have put a little sprinkle of this pecorino Romano uh actually under the mozzarella cheese I forgot I'm just gonna stick it on top though but you can put a little sprinkle of it right directly on that tomato um sounds like someone's having a real hard time going there for that uh right on top of the sauce give it a little bit of extra flavor and then finally this is just a little bit of that dried Italian seasoning okay there we go some places put their toppings under the cheese I like it on top of the cheese you do it however you want and now you saw um I didn't put much uh semolina much of anything under that crust just a little bit and you'll see how nicely this slides and if you compare that to like a New York or a Neapolitan or more wet style of pizza dough um you'll have probably have a lot of trouble getting it on off the peel I know a lot of people do this one is extremely easy to get on and off the peel just like that all right so here we go right onto a baking stone 500 degree oven and that's gonna bake for around 10 to 12 minutes or so you can keep an eye on it you want you know if you're having depending on how your oven Heats you might have to rotate it once or twice uh as it Cooks but you know Pizza is a um not a spectator sport you got to be actively involved in the whole process so keep an eye on it make sure it's cooking evenly take it out when you think it's ready um yeah and I will see you in it's been nine minutes all right so I'm gonna check on it now I checked on it actually after about five minutes and uh looked like it was going just about the right pace so I'm just going to give it a little turn oh there's one little bubble that kind of popped up there so what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna poke it down you can do with a fork um some people dock their dough before uh baking to stop these bubbles from forming some people actually don't mind the bubbles like in a New York Pizza I definitely wouldn't mind the bubbles in this style of pizza I try and go bubble free as much as possible all right so that'll just take another couple minutes and I think we're done so I will see you in two more minutes so I'm just gonna check this one more time and what I'm going to do this time is kind of peek under let's see what the underside of that crust looks like okay we're very very close I'm gonna give it another like 30 seconds um so by the way I preheated that stone for about 45 minutes um which is the minimum time you want to preheat your stone or your steel um to make sure that it has a lot of heat retained in there that's how you get that you know make sure you have enough heat coming from uh underneath it um so yeah 45 minute preheat and all right let's pop it out ready to go look at that huh it could even go like another minute but I'm not gonna make you sit here and watch so you see it has that kind of frizzled brown cheese Edge as you can see underneath it I'll lift it up easily but it looks like you know really nice uh Browning underneath it doesn't have sort of the leopard spots that a that a Neapolitan or New York Pizza might have it has more of a sort of even brownness to it which is uh you know what the goal is with this style um oh speaking of those bubbles I'm just going to talk for a moment so that this can uh have a chance to cool a bit because it's uh it's like liquid lava right now speaking of those bubbles if you really want to make sure you don't get those bubbles what you can do before baking uh is dock the dough so this is like a professional pizza dough Docker but essentially you do that and if you've got like if you ever bought like a thin crust pizza from Domino's or something you've probably seen these little dots on the bottom and that's what it's from but all it does is it makes sure that as the dough bakes there's room for the air to escape so you don't get those big bubbles if you don't have a doe Docker which I assume most people don't you can use a fork and just uh poke a bunch of holes around it before you start baking all right one final sprinkle cheese you can do Romano you can do pecorino I'm sorry pecorino or parmesan this is pecorino Romano which has a little bit more funkiness to it than parmesan now here comes the key part we're going to cut it not into triangles but into squares I'm using a Mezzaluna you know there's like a rocking pizza cutter of course you can use a wheel if you want but I do find uh this style of pizza cutter um it takes more space to store at your house but it gives you um it doesn't knock the toppings off as much as a pizza wheel will so it makes it a little bit easier especially if you're going to cut lots and lots of little squares like this all right let's see how this goes so you can see how thin it is and let's take a look at the bottom of this you see really nice you see a few different shades of brown but there's not sort of like the really pale uh outside and really dark spots that you get with like a neapolitan pizza it's more sort of an even Brown wow that looks good all right I'm gonna burn my mouth but bear with me hmm so good um so that's the pizza look down in the description for uh the recipe uh and I hope you make and love and enjoy this pizza and share it with all your friends or eat it all by yourself all right guys gals non-binary Pals uh stick around I'll see you later [Music]

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 628,068

Keywords:

Id: 5mIbyUgNOlo

Length: 32min 49sec (1969 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 18 2023