You’re Making The Wrong Pizza

Why you shouldn’t make “classic” pizza at home, and what to do instead.

Photo: Aaron Alterman

Even when pizza is bad, it’s good.

I have heard that statement so many times, and I generally agree — but not when I’m the one making it. There is no version of making pizza from scratch that takes less than a few hours, and often times recipes suggest more than 24 hours. If I am going to plan ahead and spend 4–24 hours making something, it always feels like a bummer for it to not come out great. It was a constant disappointment for me, until I realized that I was making the wrong pizza — and the right pizza comes from Detroit.

I have worked in restaurants for most of my life, and I’m an avid home cook outside of that. I have been obsessed with making sourdough bread for roughly five years, and I’m very good at it. But no matter how good of a baker I had become, pizza continued to frustrate me.

I never pulled the trigger on buying pizza peel, so trying to transfer the pizza from the counter to a pre-heated pizza stone was always ridiculous. I also broke multiple pizza stones for various reasons. The pizzas always seemed to take too long to bake. If I was trying to make more than 2 or 3 pizzas for a large group of friends, we would inevitably be making and eating pizzas for hours.

But then I discovered Detroit style pizza — a deep dish, thick and fluffy pizza that is baked in a square pan, uses cubed cheese, and puts the sauce on top of the pizza. You won’t find this pizza in a traditional Italian grandmother’s cookbook. It’s rich and might not be a pizza that you can eat a ton of. But it is just simply delicious.

Why is this the best pizza to make at home? Well for one, you probably already have the right equipment. There are traditional Detroit pizza pans for sale on the internet that are usually some sort of heavy steel, but I was able to just use a 9x9 cake pan. Your oven is also much more capable of making this pizza than classic pizza. If you didn’t know this, Neapolitan pizzas are baked in an oven over 900°F. American pizza restaurants usually use a convection oven around 550°F. I live in an apartment with a mediocre oven that maxes out at 525°F, which is more than fine for Detroit style pizza. You can also comfortably fit four pizzas in an average oven — so long as you have 4 pans. Lastly, the whole process can be done in a relatively short amount of time. You can make it ahead of time and let it rise in the fridge, but it can also be done start to finish in just over 3 hours.

They use something called brick cheese in Detroit, which I generally can’t find at my local grocery store. My solution is a mix of low moisture mozzarella and monterey jack cheese. Also traditional etiquette is to put your sauce on top of your pizza in the form of stripes. I have a simple tomato sauce recipe for this, but if you’re already taking the time to make this pizza from scratch, don’t feel bad if you want to just buy the sauce.

Because I’m a little nuts I ended up buying a portable 900°F Neapolitan pizza oven and perfecting my traditional pizza skills. But in my opinion, Detroit pizza is much more approachable for the average home cook who doesn’t want to spend a bunch of money on pizza equipment.

I made a video if you want to reference that or follow along. I make a traditional pepperoni pizza, and a non-traditional vegetarian pizza with fresh greens on top.

Recipe:

Pizza Dough (2 pizzas):

2.5 Cups (300g) Bread Flour

1 Tbsp (9g) Salt

2 tsp (9g) Sugar

2 tsp (7g) Dry Active Yeast

1 Cup (225g) Water at 110–115°F

1.5 Tbsp (20g) Extra Virgin Olive Oil

Sauce:

1 Tbsp Butter

1 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil

1 white onion

4 garlic cloves

1 Tbsp Tomato Paste

1 large (28oz or 35oz) Can San Marzano Tomatoes

1 tsp Dried Oregano

Salt to taste

Cheese:

8oz Mozzarella

8oz Moneterey Jack

Method:

1. Mixing the dough: Bloom your yeast — mix together yeast, sugar, and water and let sit for 10 minutes until foamy. Add your olive oil, flour and salt and mix to combine. Rest for 5 minutes. Using a wet hand, continue to mix dough and make sure there are no clumps of flour. Turn dough onto the counter, knead for 5–10 minutes until smooth and shape into a ball. Place dough into an oiled bowl and let rise until doubled in size, about 60–90 minutes.
2. This is a great time to make your sauce. Heat butter and olive oil in a pot until melted, and then add your onion. Cook onion until translucent, 2–3 minutes, and then add garlic. Cook for another minute or two until the garlic is fragrant. Add the tomato paste and let that caramelize on the bottom of the pot. Add the tomatoes and mix everything together. Let simmer for about 10 minutes (simmer longer if you want a thicker sauce). Transfer to a blender or food processor, or use an immersion blender and blend until homogeneous.
3. Now that your dough is doubled, punch down and divide in two. Place each dough ball into an oiled 9x9 cake pan. (If you are using a larger pan you may want to just keep this as one pizza). Stretch dough as far as it will stretch (the dough will unlikely stretch to the size of the pan). Let rest and come back to continue to stretch every 10 minutes until it has stretched to the size of the pan. Total rise time is 45 minutes
4. Cut your cheeses into small cubes 1/4" to 1/2"
5. Assemble pizza in this order — 1 layer of pepperoni, a generous amount of cheese, 3 thick lines of sauce, and more pepperoni if you want.
6. For my vegetarian pizza — olive oil and a generous amount of cheese. Mix arugula with equal parts olive oil and lemon juice and top off the pizza when it is done baking.
7. Bake at 500°F for 12–15 minutes and rotate 180° half way through.
8. Enjoy!