Real imposter

I've been in Seattle for about two months now, and I really like this town. I'm still doing some exploring, but we've already found a number of things to like:

• a local coffee shop
• a couple of good farmers' markets, and a regular market for those other days
• a few reliable breakfast joints
• a couple Asian markets
• a Chinese pastry shop
• a decent dim sum restaurant
• a few good drinking holes
• a homebrew ingredients shop
• the goodwill (obviously)
• and several good pizza joints

Not a bad list, so far.

But as anyone who's lived in the Bay Area for any significant period of time will know, there are bound to be few things that you'll really miss, especially food-wise. The three foods that I miss the most, so far, have been In-n-Out, a good burrito (especially, one from Farolito), and Zachary's pizza.

There is allegedly a good Chicago-style pizza place not too far from us, but we haven't gotten around to trying it. But I'm often skeptical about well-reviewed Chicago-style pizzas because as I've learned and heard, over and over, Zachary's is not authentic Chicago style. A few years ago, I tried "authentic" Chicago style, in Chicago, and it wasn't as good as Zachary's, in my opinion. I would say the same for other more "authentic" Chicago-style, like Little Star or Patxi's. This isn't to say they're not good, I just don't like them as much as I do "fake" Chicago-style. Long story short, I decided to try my hand at making my own Zachary's-style Chicago-style pizza.

I decided to embark on this mission because of a recent string of successful attempts at thin crust pizza. I have been using a slightly modified version of Emeril's pizza dough (I didn't use 1/4 cup of lard... seriously, he calls for 1/4 cup of LARD!!) Anyway, I noticed he had a recipe for deep dish pizza also, so I thought I'd give it a shot.

I invite you to follow along this culinary odyssey (for astute followers, you've probably realized this is my first "cooking" blog entry). I went about making the dough and a sauce, and prep the other ingredients for assembly.


Dough boobs!


A concoction of mushrooms, spinach, and tomatoes.


Some mozz, spicy Italian sausage, and red bell pepper

As I was reviewing the instructions on how to construct the pizza, something seemed amiss. It was a little different from what I remember from Zachary's. So I did a quick search and realized there is actually a recipe FOR Zachary's-style deep dish... n-Doy! Why didn't I just search for this in the beginning?

Anyway, the way they do it at Zachary's was different, as I suspected (and probably the reason people dismiss them as "authentic" Chicago style...) The main differences between these recipes were the dough prep and pizza construction. I was stuck with the dough I already prepped, but I wanted to try the Zachary's way of segregating the cheese and meats from the sauce (Who says hierarchies are always bad?)

I actually had enough ingredients to make two pizzas, but I am only posting pics of the better looking pizza (i.e., the second one). The pilot pizza was a little messed up because of the ad hoc dough modifications I made, and also I thought using a springform pan would be a good idea (it wasn't a bad idea, but it wasn't my best idea, either - for you kitchen nerds, as you would expect, the springform just doesn't hold enough heat to make for a good deep dish pizza pan). So I placed part of the dough in the bottom of the pan (I used a cast-iron skillet on the good pizza), filled it with the meat, cheese, and peppers.


Rolled out first, of course


Filled it up (yeah, it's starting to sound dirty!)


and did some segregatin'


covered it with some sauce (dirty dirty) and stuffed it in the hotbox for about 30 minutes


And the results....




It looked pretty good, and tasted pretty good. Was it as good as Zachary's? Absolutely not, but I think after this first attempt, I know how I can make it better next time. Basically, I'll prep the dough the way Zachary's does, and instead of mixing the mushrooms and spinach into the sauce (I thought it would be a good idea), I'll just add the spinach and mushrooms in with the cheese, and leave the tomatoes alone.

In conclusion, I think this pizza experiment went pretty well, although it wasn't exactly like "authentic" Zachary's-style Chicago-style... but what is?