Kenji posted his linktree with unpaywalled links to his articles and recipes:
Links to the dough, sauce, and other accompanying articles are all there.
tl;dr- Chicago thin crust is VERY thin and crisp. This is accomplished by 1) low hydration. around 50% to start. 2) really long overproofing. He recommends 3 to five DAYS in the fridge for best results. 3) curing the rolled out crusts, overnight in the fridge if you have the room, but a few hours on the counter, uncovered, 'til they dry out 'til they’re like soft leather, or a thicker tortilla. He estimates that after curing, the dough is down to an effective hydration of around 30-35%
I’d already been adding oil to my dough, but I don’t think my hydration is quite as low as his. I always proofed for at LEAST 24 hours. I’ll try more. Never thought of curing, but of course it makes sense as I think about it.
Added bonus for curing: the dryer, somewhat stiffer dough makes it really easy to assemble onto peel and slide into the oven. Make sure you use cornmeal or semolina dusting for that authentic crunchy bonus!
Burned semolina can have a nasty bitterness.
I’ve never found that to be the case when I’ve used it.
But I have cornmeal on hand so…
From the text it sounds more or less he just replicated was others were already doing, e.g. low hydration, oil addition, curing. So what is “new” beside writing it down ?
Who said anything about it being new? It’s just a home recipe for a particular style of pizza found in some restaurants in Chicago. I’m not sure anyone has published a recipe with that particular set of techniques focused on replicating what you’d get at Vito & Nick’s or the like.
I find the way he present recipes often appear in a way that he implies that he has greatly invented something new and unique when it is often just a summary of what others have done before
He explicitly credits, quotes, and has photographs of a bunch of people from whom he got techniques, and makes no claim that his recipe is anything new.
What temp do you set your oven? And do you heat that crisper ahead of time? We’ve been doing with for years with our stone.
I’ll have to go back and read all of this thread. We recently got a steel and are just bowled over by it. We make our pizzas just as we always have and they come out FAR better. So it’s just the steel (and the high temp probably) that’s making the difference.
Thanks for this. Oh, and that can looks big enough for more than two small pizzas. Do you use it all or freeze whats left?
Oven at whatever temp/time instructions call for with frozen pizza. 425° and 6-7 minutes for re-heating.
I would call our pies about medium size. 8 inches at least. I use A LOT of sauce and the can of the Bianco sauce is 15oz… so we had left overs. It’s super savory, so used it with a small side of pasta a few days later. You can CERTAINLY freeze it.
I know this isn’t the stated topic but here was last night’s pizza. TJs dough. This pizza steel is just IT as far as we’re concerned. The vendoe did recommend 2 minutes at the end on broil and we did 1. Love it.
Does this fit here? I’ve been liking our pizza dough so much that it crossed my mind to do other things.
Broke out the ooni for the first time this year.
Par baking the crust seems to yield better results with Trader Joe’s dough.
Maybe check out a baking steel. I’ll be using ours tonight and will take a pic.
I just reheated pizza using 3 different methods. Air fryer, toaster oven and cast iron with a lid. I still think the toaster oven is the superior method. The cast iron makes the bottom too crunchy. The air fryer does something that I can’t adequately explain but it’s not right. The toaster oven on 350 bake is the right combo of melty cheese and heated all the way through without being too crispy.
This morning used leftover meat from another pizza, onion (Vidalia, a tiny bit of tomato and some chunks of mozzarella and made a kinda/sorta omelette. I LOVE this kind of meal.