Use This Ingredient For Homemade Chicago-Style Pizza And You're In For A Mess

From a simple Italian peasant food to a global phenomenon, pizza has come to encompass many different styles. Perhaps the most decadent pizza of them all is the ultra-deep dish Chicago-style pie. The super thick crust is piled high with sauce, cheese, and toppings, often layered in reverse. While eating a slice of Chicago-style pie is undoubtedly messy, the mess you don't want is a soggy crust swimming in sauce. Consequently, as World Pizza Champion Tony Gemignani told us in his list of 8 mistakes to avoid with Chicago-style pizza, don't use a sauce that's too wet.

A thin, watery pizza sauce will invade the otherwise fluffy crumb of your pizza dough, inhibiting it from drying out and puffing up as the pizza bakes. Even if you manage to get the crust cooked all the way through, a pool of sauce will instill a mushy and unpleasant texture as your pizza sits in the pan. Watery sauce also creates a soup out of any toppings you pile on and might even cause a thick layer of cheese to slide off the slice entirely, making a real mess.

The solution is a thick, almost paste-like sauce. Whether you're making pizza sauce from scratch or using your favorite store-bought pizza sauce, reducing it down is a key to elevating the sauce. A reduction will both thicken it and concentrate the rich umami-flavor, which will keep your Chicago-style pizza delicious and mess-free. Reducing tomato sauce is a practice in patience as it takes about an hour at a steady simmer.

If you really don't have the time to reduce tomato sauce, you can try using another thick sauce like pesto or barbecue sauce. You could make a white Chicago-style pizza with Alfredo sauce, Canadian bacon, mozzarella, and mushrooms. A barbecue pizza with shredded chicken, cheddar, and red onions would also be delicious. 

However, soggy pizza is an issue that has more than one cause. Another reason your pizza crust might be too sloppy is imbalanced heat. So another key way to prevent soggy pizza crust is to ensure that the bottom of your oven is as hot as the top. This is especially important for a deep-dish Chicago-style pizza whose crust is buried under thick layers of cheese, sauce, and toppings.

Pizza sauce also isn't the only wet ingredient that might sabotage your crust. Toppings with a lot of moisture like spinach, mushrooms, and other veggies might threaten to undo all the hard work you put into reducing your sauce. So, a good tip for making Chicago-style pizza is to keep the toppings simple. In fact, our homemade Chicago-style pizza recipe is plain old cheese, and it's glorious. If you do choose to use extra toppings, we recommend cooking them before adding them to the pizza. For example, sauteeing spinach will draw out all that water, and you can drain and squeeze it to ensure it won't seep into your sauce and pizza crust.