Midwest-living gives us some pretty awesome pizza varieties. MrsForensicBBQ’s favorite is the Chicago-style – and although I’ve tried it, it’s not my preferred pie. When I do my work travel to New York, I come back saying the New York style pie is still the best. Then I stay home a bit and I come back around to the square Detroit-style square pizza.
Wanted to line this up with National Pizza Day – but our regular Valentines Day post led the way. I have a goal this year and I’m excited to share with you my 2025 project. This will likely spawn a few months of trial and error., so I’ll tell you I’m beginning this in January and you’ll see my progression (Hopefully progression and not regression). That’s why I the title says “project” – because it will indeed be running a gauntlet.
Pan Seasoning
I bought this particular Detroit-style pizza pan at a local restaurant equipment shop. The worker was adamant about telling me about the history of the pan, and how to season it and definitely how not to clean it. This was probably back in 2023, and I’m just now busting out this steel pan. I gotta season it, so I cranked up that RecTeq to 500 and got the vegetable oil out. Rubbed it down, burned it for 45 minutes, cooled it down and did it again. All told, this went through a 4 stage process until I was satisfied with the color.
Now, I’ve had Tony Gemignani’s recipe (Detroit Red Top Pizza by Pizza Bible) bookmarked, and it’ll hopefully be where I end this thing. There’s a lot of things I just can’t find around here – Brick cheese, Diastatic Malt come to mind, but we’ll get there for that final product. Until then, we have to test some things out.
Round One: Quick and Easy
Can I replicate the Detroit-Style pizza with store bought frozen dough, pre-shredded cheese and jarred sauce? Replicate, sure.. duplicate, probably not. There’s a reason those shops in Detroit have been around for so long. Why some cooks leave, start their own and grow just as strong as the original. The Detroit Pizza history is fascinating if you do a little bit of research. Today will just be a test run. I want to see how that pan cooks. I want to get a couple of pies out of that before I go big.
We’re going with some Tiseo’s Frozen Pizza dough, DelGrosso’s Old Style Pizza Sauce and a store brand mozzarella/provolone pizza cheese. Knowing that Mrs loves her some pizza, I offered some up – and she said “Not until it’s perfect. Don’t waste my time and appetite”. Although slightly exaggerated, since she was making her own dish – and my dough probably wouldn’t be ready until late Saturday night – I was going to pepperoni blitz this thing, with an Armour brand thin pepperoni with the cheese and topped with my favorite – cupped on top.
Laid out the dough ball and threw a layer of thin pepperoni on top. Threw down nearly the bag of the cheese on top and then the traditional stripes of sauce. I joke that Mrs didn’t want it – but the amount of leftovers she has from all the cooks she posts on here.. would be too much. So pepperonis were going to happen in full effect.
Let’s fire it up.
Heard that the cook at the bottom may be an issue for a traditional oven pie. So I threw a pizza stone at the bottom to make sure we got the crisp. (We got the crisp and then some)
Now, I checked it after about 10 minutes, and thought it could go a little longer. After roughly 16 minutes, this is the result. Had the cup pepperonis cupped, had some slight charring – I think we’re doing pretty good.
We have room for a ton of improvement. The taste wasn’t that bad. The cheese (~8oz) was pretty decent, although Mrs took a look at it and said “more”. The sauce was far too thin (expected) and I can’t wait to bring a heartier sauce next time. The dough was a miss – and this one will take some work. It was thick, so I’ll trim back the 1lb ball for sure. The bottom was a black burnt mess. Completely dark and charred – get outta here with that stone recommendation.
We got some work to do. I normally show you a cook and its great – This will be fun. I’ll bring the experiments that I do all the time to you on here. Let’s go on a journey.
In-cook notes: 500F on pizza stone for ~16 min, burnt. Bottom crust completely black. 1lb. dough ball, ~7oz cheese, pepperonis. Cut back on dough, Sauce was too thin. Dense crust.