Deep-Dish Pizza Dough - Modernist Cuisine

Deep-Dish Pizza Dough

Recipe • November 21, 2023

We discuss our deep-dish pizza dough near our thin-crust pizza doughs for a reason. It turns out that the “deep” part of deep-dish pizza consists mostly of the copious toppings, while the dough itself is pretty thin. As with our Thin-Crust Pizza Dough, this dough includes a bit of cornmeal, characteristic of the deep-dish pizzas that Chicago is famous for.

This deep-dish dough does not use a poolish and includes both butter and lard, which makes sense when you consider that deep-dish pizza is more akin to a quiche than a pizza. The dough is mixed to full gluten development, has a bench rest of 20 minutes, and proofs at room temperature for 1½ hours, so you can make it the same day you want to serve pizza. For those with the time, we have found that cold-proofing for a day will yield a crispier, even better-tasting crust.

Looking for a good deep-dish pizza sauce recipe? We’ve got you covered here.

Recipe

 

Tips & Substitutions

  • The 700 g yield of the base recipe is not enough for the dough hook to catch all the ingredients and mix a uniform dough in an 8 qt bowl.
  • If you don’t want to use lard, you can double the amount of butter in the dough.
  • We typically use a dough hook to mix all our thin-crust pizza doughs. If the ingredient quantities aren’t large enough for the dough hook to mix them well in a stand mixer or commercial planetary mixer, use a paddle attachment initially to mix the ingredients uniformly. Once you have a homogeneous mass (the dough is sticky and wet, and there are no visible clumps or unincorporated water), switch to a hook attachment.
  • The larger the yield, the longer the dough will take to mix. Final mix time at higher speeds may vary from machine to machine. Whatever the model and yield, the goal is to achieve a good mix and full gluten development. Consider our suggested times as guidelines only. Use the windowpane test to help determine the dough’s stage of gluten development.
  • If you are baking only one of the 21 cm / 8½ in pizzas, individually wrap the remaining dough with plastic wrap after preshaping the dough and freeze for up to 2 mo. The dough freezes better if you flatten the ball slightly into a disc.
  • After proofing at room temperature, you can roll the dough out and make the pizza. We recommend cold-proofing the dough for 1 d, however, because it produces a crispier deep-dish pizza.
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