Detroit Style Pizza Craze
Best thing we have made at home in a long time
Friday nights are pizza night for us all year. We find all sorts of excuses to not do stuff that would get in the way on Fridays because of this obsession. I make the dough on Tuesday and we start talking about it by Wednesday. Its weird, but hey, we could be doing cocaine.
In the summer its around a high heat pizza oven outside and what is considered a Neapolitan style pizza. During the winter months we have to make do with the home oven, which is limited to 550 degrees….not hot enough to make the Neapolitan style of the summer which needs 800 plus degrees. But cocaine/pizza Fridays must continue!
Let me be clear, ANY pizza is good pizza. Its really degrees of goodness. Hell, a pita or tortilla with cheese, sauce and toppings stuck in a toaster over is delicious. The “pizza pocket”….who doesn’t like to snarf one?
But you can make pizza in a home oven that is other worldly, “holy shit”, that is amazing….but you need to go beyond basic dough and toppings.
We had much success with the cast iron pan pizza and I posted on here about it, but there is a current craze in the pizza world called “Detroit Style”. I’ll come back to this but first some reference to localized pizza styles.
There are all sorts of region claims to pizza variations around the world. The core of Italian pizza is “Neapolitan” and the official standard for it centered in Italy, duh. Note, this is serious shit….there are regulations controlling the use of the Neopolitan term!!
Other examples include Chicago (deep dish with very thick toppings), New Haven (thin crust, coal fired ovens) New York style (softer, cheesy, thin crust). Not gonna describe them all….but “Windsor” style surprised me. In Windsor they grate their peperoni into matchstick shapes and also…..use canned mushrooms only! Its a thing, and its tasty. For the topping distribution Nazi, the shredded pepp is pretty cool!
Detroit style, supposedly born from people taking a certain pan style from manufacturing lines to make a rectangular pan pizza. Seems a stretch, but it is certainly a thing now. It has a thick crust that is crispy and chewy. Specifically topped with Wisconsin brick cheese that goes all the way to the edges so that it will melt down between the pan and the crust and caramelizes against the high-sided rectangular pan. It is topped, after all the toppings and cheese with a cooked, seasoned tomato sauce. Because of this its sometimes called a “red pizza”. (vs Neapolitan which uses uncooked basic tomato sauce UNDER the toppings)
I had been aware of this style because my son was fussing about Descendant Pizza in Toronto, who specialize in this style. He and his girlfriend ordered us some on a visit! We loved it and thought about how much we loved the crust on the cast iron pies…..we figured this was taking it to the next level and that we better get some of these Detroit Style pans and give it a try for ourselves.
We bought some, got hooked, added two more pans to be able to make 4 at a time for guests. Now its all we make at home in the winter.
These pizzas make us pause and say “oh my god” every time we eat them. They are so incredibly good, it cannot be explained. You have to just try them to know. The crusty edges look burned but they are not. They are just spectacularly flavorful and the dough pillowy and chewy to perfection. A major contributor to the experience is the seasoning in the sauce but the dough and crust lend themselves very well to off roading. One that we make every week has no sauce and stops people in their tracks. (recipe later from Descendent pizza)
Because we never leave good enough alone, we thought about how this might be improved even more, the question became….how do you end up with more crust edges? Once you eat the perimeter, the corners being the coveted parts, no more crispy goodness.
I was browsing the Reddit pizza subreddit and saw someone that used an S shaped brownie pan to cook pizza!…..more linear inches of crust! Apparently everyone wants the more edges on brownies as well.
While looking for this kind of pan on Amazon I came across a different format that might actually suit pizza better and get a similar outcome of more edges.
This is the pan, which nets 4 crusty edges per pod, or 48 crusty edges. You can see that dough bubbling away.
The results were spectacular and in some ways just a better pizza because every node is like a separate pie!
The white sauce is a truffle aioli, used on the recipe I mentioned earlier (non red sauce) You can see the air in the dough…..so….damn…..good.
Anyway, the standard Detroit can be followed and done in just a moderately high edged baking pan, and you don’t need to mess with the brownie pan method to get the otherworldly taste of this kind of pizza. The only requirement would be scaling up the dough volume if it is more than 10”x14” which is the standard size.
The easiest gateway to trying this is following the Serious Eats / Kenji Lopez method in the links below. Everything about it is super easy, including the dough.
Just do it!!!
Serious Eats Detroit Style Pizza
The Descendent pizza mushroom pie recipe is very unusual but AMAZING….try it too!
Please let us know if you try any of this!!
BTW, this is a common Detroit pan on amazon. Do NOT buy this one…..very poor quality.
Wish I was closer to pop
In for pizza Friday!!! Thanks for all the tips.