Detroit Style Pizza Techniques

[JeffJ]

klflowers Absolutely agree regarding coneys. A trip to Eastern Market will put you in the general vicinity of American and Lafayette Coney Island. Both make excellent coneys.

[klflowers]

I am coming up for my Aunt's 91st bday next month. Pizza, coneys and a trip to the Eastern Market are must do's.

[coreyo]

I was surprised too. If you read the entire thread, you'll see that it was the experiments with my Camp Chef Italia Artisan pizza oven that led me to the conclusion that high heat was better. I originally got the crust a little bit too dark and found that it was surprisingly better than a prettier, lighter golden brown. It also allows for lightning fast bake times. Loui's pizza uses a 650F oven, presumably for the same reasons. I suspect a Chicago Style pizza would not fare as well in this heat.

[coreyo]

I'm quite jealous. Detroit has recently made it on my bucket list. Even if I'm only there for a few hours, I'll have to visit at least 3 pizza places (purely for research, of course).

[bak01]

Impressive documentation and keeping your experiments controlled. Curious if the Roccbox is a good cooking medium for the Detroit style pizza. To me, it might be better served with a Neapolitan style crust at 60 or 70% hydration? (Depending on oven temperature...) Your experimentation has stimulated me to experiment with that style of pizza after I "master" the Neoplitan, and I'm almost there with that! Thanks for the great posts.

[JeffJ]

Your write-ups are fantastic. I like that you are going to use a stone to create extra heat for cooking the crust. It's my go-to method when cooking deep-dish pies in the oven. It works and you should be able to achieve similar results as what you've achieved in your pizza oven, albeit over the course of 20-25 minutes.

BTW - We celebrated my mom's birthday yesterday and went to the Tigers game (they lost 12-2 yuck!) and we went to Buddy's afterwards for dinner. The pizza was outstanding!

[coreyo]

This weekend was a good weekend. I've made progress on several fronts. First off, I found a $3 cheap non-stick 8" x 8" Oneida cake pan at the Grocery Outlet. It seems identical in every way to the $6 one that I purchased at Albertson except for the placement and brand on the logo. The dimensions appear to be identical, and they stack inside one another perfectly. These are proving to be viable options for making Detroit style pizza at home:



I think that I have found a near perfect dough recipe. Alton Brown proves himself over and over to have the superior dough recipe. I used elements from the DSPC recipe to tweak it and the results this week were nearly perfect wrt composition. This is likely to be my final dough recipe for this thread:

• 75g finely ground semolina flour
• 615g bread flour
• 9g active dry yeast (1 standard packet is fine)
• 30g sugar
• 15g kosher salt
• 460 grams bottled water
• 15 grams olive oil

Combine semolina flour, sugar, water, and yeast in your stand mixer bowl, stir, and wait for signs of life. Once you're sure that the yeast is alive, add the rest of the ingredients and mix with a dough hook. Once everything is well incorporated, it should be pretty wet and sticky. You will need to oil your hands to work with it. If using an 8" x 8" pan or equivalent, measure out 10oz portions. If using a 10" x 14" pan, measure out 18oz portions of dough. Place in well oiled containers or bowls, cover with a lid or plastic wrap, and allow to rise in the refrigerator for no less than 12 hours. You can make this dough 2 or 3 days ahead of time if you like to have a stronger fermented flavor to the bread. When ready to bake, add several tablespoons of olive oil to your Detroit style pizza pans. Rub the oil all over the bottom and sides of the pan, then tilt the pan to one side for a second or two and allow excess oil to drip out of the pan. If the oil drips out immediately, it's too much. If it drizzles out slowly, it's just right. Place the dough portions in the oiled pans and press to the edges of the pan. The dough will recede and shrink when you let go. Wait 5 - 15 minutes to allow the dough to rest, then press the dough back into the edges and corners of the pan. With some work, the dough should now stay in the shape of the pan. If there are some small gaps in the corners, that's okay. The bench-proofing stage will fix this. Cover the pans and allow the dough to rise for at least 3 hours at room temperature before building the pizzas and baking them.

King Arthur Unbleached Bread Flour is expensive, but one of the best that I've found. I also highly recommend that you buy yourself a brick of SAF yeast. It's very cheap and keeps in your freezer for years. My second-favorite yeast brand is Hodgson Mill.

Thanks to both Alton Brown: https://altonbrown.com/pizza-dough-recipe/
And DSPC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSe1W_jsRG8

Near Perfection:
My first bake this week was perhaps the best pizza that I have made so far. It might be about as close to ideal as I can hope to get. If I can reproduce these results consistently in the coming weeks, I will be satisfied. I preheated the Roccbox to about 415C (on the integrated thermometer). I then dialed the flame back as low as it would go and placed the pizza into the Roccbox. I set my phone up as a stopwatch timer and rotated a quarter of a turn (clockwise) every 45 seconds. Once I had achieved a 45 second bake on all 4 sides, I killed the flame entirely, gave the pizza another half turn, then allowed it to bake for 1 more minute. After a total of 4 minutes, this was the result:





The crust was fantastic. The overall crunch factor was very high while the center was steamy and pillowy. The caramelized cheese tasted good as well as the thick-cut pepperoni underneath. The cheez-it edges gave an extra crunch with a pleasant extra punch of flavor.

There are a few problems here: As before, the pan warped under the rocket heat, cupping upward around the edges. You can see that the center is significantly darker. It didn't seem to affect the flavor. You can also see that the cheez-it crust around the edge of the pizza is a little bit overly dark. Any actual burnt flavor was subtle if present at all. As I've stated before, the best tasting crust will be darker than you might think.

Pan Material Matters:
I cooked one more pizza in the Roccbox using the aluminum Lloyd pan. As mentioned before, the heat conductivity of this pan is very high making it more sensitive to temperatures. The pan also does not warp like the cheap pans, so the darkness levels on the bottom of the crust are much more uniform. I noticed that the cheese on top caramelizes very quickly, so I cut the rotation interval down to 30 seconds. The Roccbox had risen all the way to 450C on the dial, and this may have also been part of my problem. I dialed the flame back to its lowest setting and placed the pizza in the Roccbox. I rotated the pizza a quarter turn every 30 seconds. After a full rotation (2 minutes), I cut the flame entirely and rotated the pan every 30 seconds for another 2 minutes. After 4 total minutes (and 2 full rotations), this was my result:




As you can see, the crust was overly dark on the bottom, and definitely overly dark on the side. While it's borderline black, it was actually still pretty good. It's a bit like a Neopolitan style pizza in that the charred black bits are actually a feature, not a bug. The crunch-factor from the overly-dark bits outweighed any slight burnt flavor. Still, the goal moving forward will be to mitigate the heat a little bit with either lower temps or shorter cook times.

Trials In The Kitchen Oven:

In 2 weeks, I will be headed to St. Augustine, Florida for my cousin's wedding and family reunion. I will be showing off my new-found Detroit-style pizza skills without all of my ideal equipment. The goal will be to pick up a bunch of cheap, non-stick 8" x 8" cake pans and cook them in the condo oven (which I'm sure will be abysmal). In a broader sense, I know that many of you reading this thread will not go out and purchase a pizza oven. For these reasons, I'd like to provide a solid alternative for everyone. This week I attempted 2 pizzas in my horrible kitchen oven. I will be attempting 2 more again next week, and I will share the results of my travel pizza at the end of this month.

As discussed, the problem with Detroit-style pizza is that you need extra heat at the bottom of the pan if you want a crispy bottom to your crust (and you do want a crispy bottom to your crust). Simply baking the pizza in the center rack will cause a light, flaccid crust bottom. My idea for this week was to move my pizza stone to the very bottom rack (only about an inch above the heating element). Directly on top of that, I would set my 10" square cast-iron skillet. After preheating the oven to its max temperature for an hour, I switched it to broil for about 20 minutes to see if I could heat the stone and pan up even hotter. I then placed the 8" x 8" square pan directly on top of the 10" cast iron skillet and turned the oven back to the bake setting, allowing the pizza to bake for about 15 minutes total:



Cast-Iron:
The setup above shows how the cast-iron Bayou Classic pan fits perfectly in the 10" Lodge square skillet. Unfortunately, the 12" standard round cat-iron skillet had side walls that were too tall, and the handles on both the cast-iron and cheap cake pans would not fit. After about 5 minutes, I gave the skillet half a turn and loaded the pizza up with sauce and pepperoni. While the top and sides of the pizza were pretty good, the bottom of the crust was still abysmal:




Not that this pizza was bad. Overall, I'd still be impressed if it was my first introduction to Detroit style pizza. However the overall crunch-factor simply was not there. The only crunch came around the cheez-it edges of the pizza. The cast-iron pan is once again creating too much of a heat-buffer for the bottom of the crust.

Cheap Cake Pan:
I used the same method with one of the cheap 8" x 8" non-stick cake pans. I cooked the pizza for 15 minutes, rotating about half a turn halfway through the bake. The thinner pan yielded better results. The following photos provide a very visually appealing specimen. The result was actually pretty decent in most respects:





The bottom of the crust was not bad. It was still significantly lighter than is ideal, but it provided a small bit of crunch to every bite. The caramelized toppings and cheez-it sides of the crust were just about right, and I had no complaints. I clearly need to find a better solution for applying heat to the bottom of the crust, but at least this provides hope for future trials.

The Lineup:
Each lineup shows the pizzas in the order they were presented in this post from left-to-right. First, let's compare the crust bottoms:


The Roccbox clearly yields a darker crust. The overall Roccbox specimens are superior and the difference is dramatic. The pizza on the far left has a near-perfect crust bottom.

Next, let's look at the cross sections:


Here we see again that the lower temperatures of the kitchen oven (two pizzas on the right) give a higher rise.

Roccbox Lineup:

The Loyd pan has consistently produced a slightly thinner pizza than the others. At first I thought that this is because the crust was frying and setting more quickly because of the faster initial heat-transfer. I am now noticing that the dough simply doesn't rise as high during the bench proofing phase. I think this is a combination of the rectangular shape (vs square) and the fact that the sides have a much more dramatic flare to them.

Kitchen Oven Lineup:

The cast-iron pan has the highest rise. This may be solely due to the fact that it seems to promote higher rises during the bench proofing phase. You can see that the air pockets are slightly larger than those baked in the Roccbox at higher temperatures. While this is more ideal, there is a tradeoff: Because the bread has longer bake times, the entire pizza seems to heat more evenly, providing more heat to the center of the pizza. This allows for more of the moisture in the dough to escape and the center to set more firmly. While it has a nice airy rise, the sensation on the tongue is not quite as soft as those baked under higher temperatures. It also lacks that sensation of steam escaping in every bite when you eat a slice fresh out of the oven. Anyone familiar with Neopolitan style pizza understands that this is why the rocket-like high temperatures are so important. The difference between the two is less apparent once the pizzas has cooled (with respect to the center of the crust).


For Next Week:
- I will do a couple more pizzas in the kitchen oven. I'm going to try to remove both the pizza stone and the casti-iron baking "steel". The idea here is that the heating element will only be about an inch or so from the bottom of the pan and might do a better job heating it directly.
- I think that I can go with an even shorter bake in the Roccbox. I might go down to 3 minutes, or even 2 minutes in the case of the aluminum Lloyd pan. I might even be able to kill the flame as soon as the pan goes in the oven and just bake on the residual heat. This will probably take several more weeks to sort out.
-The 8" x 10" pans seem to require an extra ounce or so of dough to get the same thickness/lift as compared to the 8" x 8" pans. I suspect that the rectangular shape and dramatically flared sides have something to do with this, given that the effective area at the bottom of the pan is about the same as the 8" x 8" pans.
- I'm going to try ordering an actual steel pan 8" x 10" pan from the DSPC. I'd like to compare the difference between the Aluminum Lloyd pans and the actual steel. My hypothesis is that the heat conductivity of the steel will be lower than that of the aluminum. In the case of the ultra-hot bakes in the Roccbox, this might be beneficial.
- Since I'm doing a lot of baking in the Roccbox in pans with no handles, It has become evident that I need some pan grippers

Here are some links to what I'm considering:

https://detroitstylepizza.com/product/8-x-10-authentic-steel-detroit-style-pizza-pan/?attribute_choose-your-pan=Bare+Unseasoned+Pan+%2414.75

https://detroitstylepizza.com/product/small-detroit-style-pizza-pan-lid-8-x-10/

https://detroitstylepizza.com/product/pan-grippers/

As usual, thanks to everyone following this thread. I'll try to post again next week.

[coreyo]

Right, I think the plan would be to preheat the oven on bake as high as it will go, wait at least half an hour, then set the oven to broil, wait for 20 - 30 minutes, then place the oven back on high bake and stick the pan directly on the pizza stone. I'm also eager to try this with cast iron underneath the 8" x 8" pan. It seems a great way to sneak in a seasoning session during an actual cook.

[au4stree]

Wow, these pizzas look great!

[RonB]

Great idea. If you have a stone, (not steel), I suggest heating slowly so as to not stress the stone.

[coreyo]

My wife was not excited at all when I began planning my weekends around pizza night. However, since I started making her a dedicated cheese pizza every week, she's slowly begun looking forward to it and giving me suggestions on how she wants the next pizza.

[coreyo]

I was mulling over this idea and I was thinking that using the broiler in a pan-pizza scenario might be counter-productive. I can see why it would work well for more traditional pizzas like Neopolitan pizzas. However, It did give me a different idea. What if we use the broiler for 20 - 30 minutes to heat the pizza stone or pizza steel before placing the pizza in the oven? We could then back it off to a standard 550F bake once the door is closed.

[coreyo]

hmm... might be worth a shot. Might have to cover the top with foil for part of the bake too. If only there were a 'bottom broil' setting.

[ribeyeguy]

Well coreyo, thanks a lot. After reading this entire thread I just informed my wife that we're moving to Detroit. She looked at me like I was crazy and asked me what possible reason I could have for wanting to move to Detroit. When I told her "the pizza" she shook her head and walked away with a disgusted look on her face. Yep, I'm sleeping on the couch again tonight.

[RonB]

On one of the pizza forums, I have read that you can get your oven over it's max temp by cooking your pie at the max temp and then switching to broil with the door closed. You would need to have the pie on the bottom shelf to prevent the heat from the top element from over cooking the toppings.