Homemade Chicago Deep Dish Pizza

I've never had a good Chicago style deep dish pizza outside of Chicago.  When I'm visiting friends and relatives in other areas of the country they often want to take me to a local place that serves "authentic" Chicago deep dish, but it rarely delivers.  Most often they just serve a version a pan pizza, a thick crust topped with standard toppings baked in a walled pan.  Chicago deep dish is baked in a similar pan, but has a much thinner crust that's pressed into the pan and up the sides.  For some time I've been experimenting with my recipe for Chicago deep dish pizza, but because I don't want to weigh 300 pounds I have to take it a little slow.  Here is my latest attempt...

The pans used for deep dish pizza are usually made of blue steel and have to be seasoned, I used to have a nice blue steel one like this one from Ottinetti but at some point over the years it was lost.  Blue steel pans have to be seasoned, but once that's done they'll last for years and years as long as you take care of (and don't misplace) them.  Lacking an authentic deep dish pan I opted to just use a large cast-iron skillet.

I used the following recipe for the dough...

300 grams AP flour
174 grams water
70 grams corn oil
7 grams EV olive oil
9 grams IDY
4 grams sugar
6 grams salt

The sugar was dissolved in the water and the yeast sprinkled over top and mixed in.  After allowing that to sit for a few minutes all the rest of the ingredients were added and mixed for about 1 minute.  The dough was then put in the refrigerator overnight.  The next morning the dough was put out at room temperature and allowed to ferment all day while I was at work (about 9-10 hours), my theory on the buttery flavor in good Chicago deep dish dough is that the long, warm ferment allows for the formation of diacetyl which is a component of artificial butter flavor.  When I got home I pressed the dough in to the pan and up the sides.  The dough was a little too slack in my opinion, next try I'm going to cut the oil down by about 25% to try and get something a little easier to handle.

Slices of mozzarella were placed on top of the dough going up the sides, I also had some shredded mozzarella that I put on top of the slices.  Next came Italian sausage (from Bari here in Chicago), sliced onions, pepperoni and green peppers.  All that was topped with sauce and more cheese was sprinkled on top.  Normally the cheese on top would be a combination of pecorino romano  and parmesan but due to a recent refrigerator failure my food stocks are still a little low.

The sauce was simple, just a can of 6-in-1 crushed tomatoes seasoned with a a few teaspoons kosher salt, a clove of garlic (minced), 1 teaspoon of greek oregano and a little sugar to taste.

The pizza was baked at 400°f for 30 minutes, then the oven temp was lowered to 350°f and baked for another 30 minutes.  Once removed from the oven it was allowed to cool in the pan for ~ 5 minutes before being de-panned and put on a brown paper bag to wick away excess oil.

A pizza wheel isn't much use for this type of pie, a long chef's knife can be used but I prefer a rocker style pizza cutter.  The dough cooked well, but the excess slackness caused the edges to be a little thicker than I would have liked, reducing the oil in the recipe (to 50 grams corn and 5 grams EVOO) should remedy this problem the next time.  Flavor was spot on but I might go for a fennel or hot Italian sausage for the next go.  Still a work-in-progress but getting very close to where I want it to be.

Cheap, reusable alternative to bisquettes for a Bradley Smoker

I've really enjoyed my Bradley Smoker over the last year and hope to use it quite a bit this summer now that it's finally warmed up outside.  As described in an earlier post, the Bradly is an electric Smoker that uses compressed wood chip pucks, called bisquettes, to produce the smoke.  Bisquettes are fairly inexpensive (about 3 for $1 from Amazon) but I've had some trouble finding them locally, especially late in the season when places like Home Depot and Menard's have cleared out their grill supplies to make room for snow blowers.  This can be a problem if I forget to plan ahead and don't have a supply on hand when I want to smoke something.  The other thing is that you're restricted to the woods that Bradley decides to make available in bisquette form.

A recent thread on The Hungry Onion about electric smokers got me to thinking about finding an alternative to bisquettes for those times that I may be out or when I want to use something different for smoke than what's available (herbs, tea, other woods etc...).  I started looking around and found these 1 ounce flat metal tins on Amazon (often sold as containers for homemade lip balms) that are close in dimensions to a bisquette (about 3/8" less in diameter and 1/16" thicker) and decided to give them a try.

Here is one of the tins next to a bisquette.  Using the reamer tool on a Swiss army knife  I punched several holes in the lids (ended up with 9 per tin).  I had been saving the left-over wood chips in the bottom of bisquette trays and put about a teaspoon of chips in each tin, closed them up and loaded them in the bisquette hopper.  The test run went really well, the control box advanced the tins down the ramp to the burner plate with zero issues.  Due to the slightly lower diameter each tin ended up spending a total of 40 minutes on the burner plate, half on and half off.  I opted not to fill the catch bowl with water as I figured that could damage the tins or make then difficult to open later for reuse.  When I did open the tins later all of the chips had burned up.  Hopefully I'll be able to fully load the tins with wood chips this weekend and see how they do in an actual cook!

Please keep in mind that the use of these tins as a bisquette alternative is an experiment, try at your own risk!

NuWave PIC2 Portable Induction Cooktop

A few days after I recommended the Rosewill induction cooktop that I've been using in the office for over three years, it started making odd clicking noising and giving me a brief "E1" message.  After a few seconds it would start heating but continued to make the clicking noises as long as it was operating.  After removing the casing to see if I could see an obvious cause I just decided it was time for a replacement.  I didn't want to spend too much money since this was going to live in my office, so after a brief search I settled on a NuWave PIC2 Induction Cooktop.

I remember seeing their infomercials on late-night TV and had heard good things about the hardware, but not so good things about buying it directly from them.  Since I have Amazon Prime I just ordered it from there for just under $60.  The PIC2 is a little less powerful than the Rosewill it's replacing, 1300 watts vs. 1500 watts.  For a little more money (about $75) there is the NuWave PIC Pro, which delivers 1800 watts of power.

Upon opening the box I was pleasantly surprised to find that the PIC2 came with a 9" Duralon ceramic coated non-stick fry pan.  I didn't really have a need for another frying pan at the house so it made the trip with the cooktop to live in my office.  The cooktop has six preset levels (Low-100°f, Med Low-175°f, Med-275°f, Med-High-375°f, High-425°f and Max/Sear-575°f) but you can use the controls to set the temperature to anything you want in 1° increments up to 575°f.  The cooktop is also programmable so you can set it to cook at one temperature for a set amount of time, them automatically lower to another temperature for holding.

So far I've only done one test run, I measured out 1 liter of cold tap water (50°f) and timed how long it took to come to a rolling boil using the Max/Sear setting.  This is pretty subjecting since results will vary greatly depending on the quality of the pan being used, and since these stay in my office I'm using the cheapest pans I could find.  It took 5 minutes and 45 seconds for the water to go from tap temperature up to a rolling boil.  This is actually a little faster than it took the Rosewill cooktop to bring 1 liter of cold tap water up to a rolling boil, but that was in a different pan.  Tomorrow will be the first time I use the new cooktop to make lunch, hopefully it'll be as good and last at least as long as the Rosewill did.

72 Hour Short Ribs

Short ribs are one of the most transformative dishes you can make using low temperature cooking.  The technique allows you to transform the meat inn to something with the tenderness of tenderloin, but with the full beefy flavor of a tough cut of meat.  The results can vary depending on the time and temperature used, in the past I've gone for 72 hours at 55°C which resulted in pink, medium rare meat which still held its shape when cut.  This time I decided to go with the recipe found in Nomiku's Tender app, which used a slightly higher temperature (60°C) for the same amount of time.



The recipe calls for red wine to be bagged with the ribs, since I use a Food Saver I find the best way to do this is to freeze the wine first so it doesn't get sucked out of the bag while the vacuum is being pulled.  I added a little Worcestershire sauce to the wine and let it sit in the freezer for a few hours until solid.  The ribs were liberally seasoned with salt and pepper, I like the flavor a pre-sear brings to the game so I heated up a skillet with some beef tallow and browned one side of each shot rib.  Once they had cooled a bit I bagged the ribs with the wine cube, a roughly chopped stalk of celery, some carrot, a quartered small onion, two cloves of garlic and some fresh herbs.  The bag was vacuum sealed and placed in a bath with the Nomiku set to 60°C.  I had never used the timer function before so I set it for 72 hours, adjusted the water level and put the lid on the Cambro.  After 72 hours I kind of expected the Nomiku to reduce the bath temperature to 50°C for holding, but instead it just stayed at the 60°C and started counting up.  I set the timer manually, I believe it's possible to have the circulator lower to a holding temperature once the timer counts down to zero but you may have to set it using the Tender app for that functionality.  For a sauce I quartered some crimini mushrooms and browned them along with some onions.  I removed the ribs from the bag, poured the purge through a fine mesh strainer and poured it in to the mushrooms to deglaze the pan.  A sprig of rosemary was added along with a clove of garlic and the liquid was reduced until it became syrupy.  For sides I boiled some new potatoes and steamed some asparagus over them while they were cooking.

The ribs ended up with a consistency like they had been braised, but still nice and pink.  The fat was quite soft and melted away when bitten in to.  I would probably not use the same wine next time, we don;t drink a lot of wine so I used a bit of Merlot from a small single serve bottle I found in the cupboard.  It resulted in an off odor when the bag was opened, next time I'll probably omit the wine and just use some beef stock instead.  Reducing the purge with the mushrooms resulted in a really nice sauce so if I want some wine flavor I'll probably just add it there next time.  With those few tweaks I think this will be a go-to dish.

Sous Vide Nashville Hot Chicken

Nashville Hot Chicken is starting to become more and more available outside Tennessee, basically a highly spiced piece of fried chicken that after cooking is coated with a paste of cooking grease and hot spices.  While I've never had the chance to try it at the source we now have several places in Chicago that serve the dish.  Not too long ago I can across this article at Kentucky.com and decided I'd try to do my take on this regional specialty.

I made a spice blend based on the one in the article with a few minor changes based on what I had in the cabinet.  The blend I came up with is:

3 TB cayenne pepper
2 ts dry mustard
1 1/2 ts table salt
1 ts sugar
1 ts chipotle powder (didn't have any hot or smoked paprika)
1 ts black pepper
3/4 ts garlic powder
1/2 ts celery salt (mainly because I have a crap-ton of celery salt)

Because I had them I decided to use boneless/skinless chicken breasts.  I generously dusted all sides of the chicken with the spice mix before putting them in a gallon size Ziploc bag and letting them sit in the refrigerator for 24 hours.  The next day I filled a 12 quart cambro up to the 10 liter mark, attached the WiFi Nomiku and set the target temp to 150°f.  Once the bath was heated I put in the bag containing the seasoned chicken breasts and let them soak for 90 minutes.  When done the bag was removed from the bath and put in the refrigerator to chill.

Now it was time to play with the Paragon Induction Cooktop.  I figured I'd make some fries first to go with the chicken, I cut a russet potato in to batons and let them soak in cold water for about 10 minutes before rinsing several times.  About 6 cups of grease (corn oil with a little bacon grease) was put in a 3 quart sauce pan and the wireless probe put in place.  The potatoes were drained, patted dry with paper towels and put in the cold oil.  Finally the Paragon temperature was set to 370°f, rapid precision mode selected and the unit turned on.  Once the oil temp got over 212°f I switched to gentle precision mode and made sure to shake the pan every two minutes or so to keep things from sticking together.  This method worked pretty well, however as you can see in the picture there were a few fries in contact with the bottom of the pot initially which caused to brown a little before the others.  I may look in to using a small, round cooling rack next time to keep them from coming into contact with the bottom next time.

Now on to the chicken.  A two stage breading station was setup with plain flour on one side and a mixture of buttermilk, the spice mix and some of the purge from the cooking bag in the other.  One of the cold chicken breasts was first dredged in the flour, then coated with the buttermilk mix and then back into the flour.  Once everything was nice and coated it was allowed to rest on a piece of parchment paper while the oil got back up to temperature (which doesn't take too long for that small quantity of oil in rapid precision mode).  The chicken was carefully lowered in to the oil and cooked until the crust turned a nice golden-brown color.  Since the meat was pre-cooked there was no reason to worry about the internal temperature reaching 165°f, it just needs to be heated through.  I turned the chicken breast once, which can be a little tricky in such a small saucepan so care is needed to prevent being splashed with boiling hot oil.  Once done a tablespoon of the hot oil was added to about the same measure of the spice mix and used to coat the chicken breast.

The chicken had great flavor and the sous vide fried chicken method ensures that the meat remains tender and juicy.  I could have done with a little more heat, next time I'm at the store I'll need to pick up some hot paprika to try and dial it up a bit.  All in all a successful first attempt, but still room to tweak the recipe.  I'll have to stop by Gus's Fried Chicken for some authentic inspiration!

Playing with the Paragon Induction Cooktop

Over the weekend I had finally some time to play around with my Paragon Induction Cooktop.  Before I could do that however, I needed to invest in some induction-ready cookware.  My T-fal professional skillet  is induction ready as well as my cast iron and carbon steel skillets, but none of my pots or saucepans would work with the new cooktop.  I went out looking for some suitable pots to use with the Paragon.

When I first became aware of the Paragon Indigogo campaign I thought it would be ideal to control the temperature during the mashing phase of homebrewing.  For this I needed an induction ready stockpot large enough to contain the mash, and because it would be exposed to acidic conditions it needed to have a stainless steel interior rather than aluminum.  The Tramontina 22 quart stockpot pictures to the left fits the bill nicely and at a low price to boot.  I also wanted a smaller saucepan to use for deep frying, soups and of course, sauces.  I ended up buying a 3 quart non-stick saucepan from Nuwave.  The Duralon non-stick coating is ceramic based and can withstand temperatures up to 475°f so it should have no problem with the temperatures needed for deep frying.  I plan on making some hush puppies later tonight so I'll get to see how it fares.

As a test I filled up the stockpot with around 14.5 liters of cold tap water to see how long it would to bring it up to 150°f.  Pairing the wireless probe to the cooktop is simple, just plug in the Paragon and push the button on the side to the probe battery case.  A Bluetooth symbol will flash three times and the probe will sync with the cooktop.  Once that is done you can select the rapid or gentle precise mode and set the desired temperature with the +/- buttons.  My understanding is that rapid mode will allow the maximum power level to go up to 10, while in gentle mode it is restricted to 5.  The starting temperature of the water was 50°f and in an uncovered pot is took 1 hour 10 minutes to reach 150°f (quick tip, the adhesive on the sticker started to loosen at around 110°f allowing it to be peeled off).  I did notice that the temperature consistently read 2°f higher using my Thermapen than what the wireless probe was showing, I'm not sure if there's a way to program in an offset but if not I'll just know to set the temperature 2°f lower than I want.  While I had the cooktop on I took the opportunity to sync it up to the FirstBuild app, I haven't had a chance to play around with it yet so I'm not sure what additional features it opens up but will try and do so this afternoon.

It's Here!: Paragon Precision Induction Cooktop Edition.

My latest gadget just arrived, the Paragon Induction Cooktop!  I haven't had a chance to play with it too much, probably won't be able to do so until the weekend, but wanted to post a few pics of the unboxing.

Here's the box as delivered.  A little damage on the corners and the box wasn't taped at all to prevent the box from being opened en route.

Here is the box opened to show all the gadgetry goodness!  The cooktop itself is a bit larger than I expected, the cooking surface is 12" across with an 18" diameter including the controls and feet.































Here is everything removed from the box.  The most interesting thing to me is the wireless probe shown in front.  When paired to the cooktop and attached to a pot of liquid it is supposed to allow you to control the temperature of the liquid in the pot to +/- 1°f up to 375°f.  My original thought when backing the campaign was that it would be very useful for home brewing beer, during the mash you need to bring the pot up to a precise temperature and hold it there while the enzymes in the malt convert starches to sugars.  This should make that job much easier.  Sous vide cooking it another cooking method that could be performed with this piece of equipment, but I'll probably stick with my Nomiku for that.  I can see myself using it for deep frying, I do have a dedicated fryer, but it requires 5 liters of oil and is a pain in the arse to clean up.  That's fine if I'm cooking for a crowd but not worth the trouble if it's just for two ot three.  The Paragon cooktop will allow me to use whatever size pot is most suitable for what I'm making.  This should also shine at low temperature poaching in whatever liquid I want to use be it court bouillon, olive oil or even butter!  I have the probe charging now and hope to put the Paragon Induction Cooktop through its paces soon!