Chicago Style Deep Dish...kinda

I hate how some recipes are so gosh darn complicated. I get that they're detailed to ensure that your results will be authentic, but if I can cut out half the time for 90% payoff, it's worthwhile to me for the time saved to results lost ratio. Like this Chicago style pizza recipe for example. I've been craving the stuff and stumbled across this recipe taken from Cook's Illustrated. But if you take all the time specified spent making the dough, laminating the dough, and making the sauce, that would be a couple of hours and that's before you even start putting your pizza together. 

So here's what I did. I made the dough from scratch using the recipe (omitting cornmeal since I didn't have any, you can use any dough recipe actually). And that was the most tedious unnecessary step since Trader Joe's sell bags of premade dough that are delicious. Alas I didn't have time for a TJ's run so from scratch it is. I simmered some diced tomatoes in pasta sauce to cook it down and added dried herbs for flavor, but you can just use storebought pizza sauce directly. When ready to build your pizza, just preheat oven to 425F and mold dough to a deep dish cast iron skillet or a springform pan. Pour in 8oz of shredded mozzarella on top of the dough, and top with your pizza sauce.

Sprinkle the top layer with your meat toppings (pepperoni in my case) and parmesan cheese. If you used a springform pan, you can now place it in the oven to bake directly for 20-30 minutes until golden brown. If you used cast iron, you would need to warm up the pan first, so turn your stove on high heat and let your pizza pan heat up for about 3-5 minutes until you can see the sauce bubble a little. Transfer to oven to finish baking.

Ta da! There's some oil that collected in the middle of my pizza, probably from the pepperoni. This whole process took an hour and a half and that includes making dough from scratch (and half assing some pasta sauce). So if you use storebought dough and pizza sauce, you can make it in 45 minutes or less. It's not the most authentic but it's close enough and delicious enough.

Mmmm cheesy. After it's done baking, you're supposed to let it sit for 10 minutes, but I like my food piping hot so we cut into it right away. Alas the cheese/sauce was too melty and oozy straight out of the oven, so my slice fell apart :( But so good. It serves two with plenty of leftovers.

Recipe: 30 A Week (who got their recipe from Cook's Illustrated)