Turning Frozen Pizza Into A Detroit-Style Deep-Dish Is Worth The Easy Extra Steps

Pizza is a globally beloved food that has come to encompass numerous styles, and Detroit-style pizza is a favorite both in and outside of the Motor City. What makes Detroit-style unique is that it combines two famous styles, Sicilian and Chicago deep dish, into one decadent square pie. Like the Sicilian, the Detroit-style pizza is square or rectangular, with a fluffy, fairly thick crust. And like the Chicago deep dish, it's cooked in a pan and layers sauce on top of the cheese.

While you can always make your own Detroit-style pizza from scratch, you can also transform your favorite frozen pizza brand into a Detroit-style deep-dish with a few easy extra steps. Of course, most frozen pizzas are round, so the trick is to reshape them while also transforming the crust into the crunchy coating of burnt cheese that makes Detroit-style pizza so good. To do this, you'll thaw a frozen pizza while you heat up a deep square oven pan at 450 degrees with some oil in it. Take the pan out of the oven when the pizza has thawed and sprinkle shredded cheese around the perimeter before placing the thawed pizza in the square pan. Mold the pizza to fit in the pan, filling the holes at the four corners of the pan with more shredded cheese. Top the pizza with more cheese, followed by pizza sauce and any other toppings like pepperoni, before sliding the pizza into the oven to bake.

Placing oil at the bottom of the pan will both crisp up the crust and the underlying layer of cheese while also helping you remove the pizza when you take it out of the oven. While 450 degrees Fahrenheit is a hot oven, you can crank up the heat as high as your oven will go for the best results, as a super hot oven is the key to getting those crispy burnt cheese edges on a Detroit-style pizza. If you're wondering what type of pan to use for this frozen pizza transformation, a square or rectangular cake pan will do the trick. No need to go looking for a steel Detroit-style pan unless you're a stickler for authenticity.

While you can use mozzarella cheese for the crust and topping, a true Detroit-style pizza uses brick cheese, a cheddar-adjacent cheese with a nice tangy, subtly sharp taste. Of course, you can always blend mozzarella and cheddar cheese to assimilate the flavor of brick cheese. Any jar of pizza sauce will work to spread over the extra layer of cheese, but you can also switch things up with a creamier vodka sauce. You don't have to coat the entire pizza in sauce, as a lot of Detroit-style pizzas spoon two parallel landing strips of sauce down the length of the pizza, leaving the perimeter and a thin middle section sauce-free. Finally, when you're ready to dig in, bring a fork and knife!