Over the past few years, I’ve been entirely covered in cheese-crusted crusts. This isn’t the wrong place to be, but it’s not the best place.
When was the date that Detroit pizza became a thing? I’m referring to Motor City offering pizzas with a rectangular pan City since at least 1946. In 1946, according to PMQ Pizza Media, bar manager Gus Guerra, and his wife, Anna, decided to put a portion of Anna’s mother’s Sicilian dough into a blue steel skillet that was initially used to transport auto parts and bake it with sauce and cheese. The pizza was topped with a blackened, lacy crispy cheese crust that extended to the edges, creating a new style of pizza. Buddy’s Restaurant, which the Guerras founded, has been serving pizza since.
But that’s not really what I’m talking about. What was the date it became a phenomenon? Since the beginning of 2016, around this writing, it was everywhere discussing it, writing about it, or setting up establishments devoted to it. I first learned about it in 2008 when the former Serious Eats editor and current bar pie expert Adam Kuban included it in his extensive pizza guide; however, it wasn’t until the following year, on my annual Michigan hunting trip, that I had the pleasure of tasting it first at an eatery called Buddy’s located in Detroit.
What Is Detroit-Style Pizza?
I’m not sure why it didn’t explode earlier. It’s delicious. Let’s begin at the beginning and move upwards: The crust comes out crispy and golden at the bottom and has a lightly fried texture created by the heat of the fat rendered by the cheese that runs down the cheese. Then, we get to the crumb, a chewy texture with a fine bubble structure. Not as rustic as focaccia; however, it’s not as soft and soft as the NY-style Sicilian slice.
Then things start to get a bit off-balance. Instead of an order of “sauce, cheese, toppings,” the menu of the typical pizza, Detroit pizzas, has a reverse design. Brick cheese that is tangy and creamy from Wisconsin is sliced and sprayed directly on the surface of the dough wh, ich it cooks to become deliciously buttery, gooey, and thick in the middle. It is crisp and dark brown at the edges. The cheese on top is a rich, sweet tomato sauce sprinkled with spices and garlic, often placed in thick parallel bands. Suppose you choose to order pizza with pepperoni (the most commonly used topping) by the location you’re in. In that case, you may discover it crisp and cupped over the sauce or, often, under the cheese, ensuring its flavor is absorbed into every bite. * It’s crunchy, fatty, cheesy, sweet, tangy, and excellent, especially the sought-after corner pieces that add the extra crunch.
When they’re at the center, do we call them “middlings” instead of “toppings”?
This isn’t your typical pizza. It’s not every-week pizza. It may not even be monthly if you wish to live to an acceptable age. It’s excellent pizza. It’s so good; it’s worth a trip to Detroit to sample it. It’s so good it’s worth dedicating several months, weeks of study, and hundreds of experiments to devising recipes to replicate the taste at home. That’s precisely what I tried. Here’s what I came across.
Finding the Perfect, Chewy Crust
I chose to begin my research by looking at the crust. I used mozzarella with low moisture and Rao’s from a jar sauce to test this. I already have a simple recipe for a foolproof pan pizza that I used as a base and thought I could modify it to suit an actual Detroit pie. This recipe follows a simple formula that does not require kneading using water and flour. The mixture is mixed with yeast (1 percent of the flour’s weight) and salt (2.5 percent) and then mixed in a bowl until a shaggy dough is formed. It is covered with a lid and put aside for a night. Throughout that night, yeast expands and creates carbon dioxide bubbles that gradually expand and grow, making your dough. When you wake up, you’ll have a soft, stretchy dough with plenty of gluten growth.
A bit too much gluten development as it transpired.
Good growth of gluten and soft, high-moisture dough leads to a rustic hole structure with a rich chew and a mixture of small, big, tiny, and moderate-sized bubbles. It’s a delicious dish, but Detroit pizza needs to be more homogeneous. But I still liked the idea of no-knead pizza dough, so I tested it several times with various ratios of flour and water. In the language of bakers, it is referred to in baking as “hydration level”: A “60% hydration dough” is a dough that requires sixty grams of water per 100 grams of flour. The original pan pizza I made is hydrated to around 70 percent. I tried to go to as low as 60%, resulting in an uncooked dough with smaller holes (suitable!) and a dense and more complex texture (wrong! ).
