As a former resident of Chicago and partner
of someone raised on Lou Malnati's, I must say this pizza is to Chicago-style
as Arlington Heights is to Chicago: close, but pretty much an hour away. It's
pretty much my best compromise between taste and hassle.
So I started with a sourdough crust. I used
the usual amount of starter (about half a cup, or a heavy half cup) as I would
for a loaf of bread. To this I added 2 cups of white flour, a good teaspoon or
two of salt, about two tablespoons of melted butter, a few tablespoons of white
sugar, and maybe half a cup of water (just enough for the dough to come
together, no more). Like regular bread, I put this in the mixer to knead for 15
minutes, adding white flour as necessary. I put the dough ball in a sprayed, floured
springform pan, and pressed the dough out to the edges. I sprayed the dough
with cooking spray, covered the top in plastic wrap, and put the pan in the
un-airconditioned laundry room to rise for about 14 hours (I made it at 7am,
dinner is 9ish pm).
While the oven was preheating to 350
degrees, I cooked my ugly tomatoes (maybe about three cups, diced) in a saute
pan with a tablespoon or two of oil. This is important because too much
moisture from the tomatoes can make the dough soggy. I cooked them for about
8-10 minutes, until they released a lot of water but before they broke down
into mush. Lou Malnati's tomato sauce has some texture to it, so I wanted to
preserve this in my sauce. At the last minute (literally, for the last minute
of cooking) I added a handfull of chopped fresh basil and oregano (but a
tablespoon of dried would be fine), salt and pepper, and one chopped clove of
garlic.
I set a strainer over a bowl, and poured the
tomato mixture through this to get rid of excess water. I still wanted some
structure to my tomatoes, so I couldn't cook all the water away. I had probably
1/3 c tomato liquid in the bowl; I'll use this in a soup or in a bloody mary,
maybe.
You can--and it's probably preferable
to--use canned diced tomatoes here. I definitely will in the winter, when I
don't have bowls of tomatoes on my kitchen counter. For canned tomatoes, I
would still cook them with some herbs, and maybe some garlic.
At this point I drizzled a teensy bit of
olive oil on top of the dough, and sprinkled a few good handfulls of shredded
mozzerella cheese (just the kind from the bag at the grocery store) on top,
enough to cover well. I put the tomato sauce on top of the cheese (this is how
Chicago style works, people).
I put this in a 350 degree oven for 20
minutes; I then turned the oven up to 400 and cooked another 10 minutes.
The photos are noticeably better in this
post because Christian took them.
Yeah, I know. Grape pie? I was skeptical at first, too. But, with our grape vine in the back yard, we had too.many.grapes. (Well, too few for wine but too many for anything else.) I was drying them (into raisins that, unfortunately, did not dance and sing motown), putting them on savory flatbreads, pureeing them into smoothies, cooking them down into fillings for turnovers (more on this later), cooking them down to put into a coffee cake, eating them straight, you name it. A pie seemed like an easy way to consume mass quantities of grapes. And it turned out great, actually. You can use this as a blueprint for almost any fruit pie--you just need to adjust sugar and corn starch to the sweetness and water content of the fruit you're working with.
For the crust, I doubled Chow's pie crust recipe so that I could make a double-crust pie. A few things seem really important to making a truly outstanding pie crust: (1) don't overmix the dough--it won't all be fully incorporated until you add in the water; and (2) let the dough rest in the fridge before rolling it out; this was the first time I let pie dough rest in the fridge before rolling, and it made a HUGE difference in flakiness, texture, and overall deliciousness. Oh, and I ALWAYS use salted butter. ALWAYS. Salt is your friend; it enhances the sweetness of sweet things, the overall flavor of a dish, etc. There's practically no way you can consume an unhealthy amount of salt in a homemade, non-industrially-processed dish. I know unsalted butter is the "proper" butter to bake with, but I do not give a frack. Other things to note about the pie crust process:
A. I didn't want to waste a whole egg on egg wash, so I used some half-and-half instead (milk and eggs are both protein, right, so they'll both brown the top); this actually worked very well.
B. Dusting the top with sugar is really necessary. The pie crust itself is not very sweet at all, and the sugar on top is a huge help, especially since the grapes are not too sweet, either.
So, while the crust dough was resting in the fridge, I cooked down a few cups of grapes. I put them in a skillet with some butter (maybe 1-1.5 tbsp) and upwards of four tablespoons of sugar. I cooked them until 60% of them were broken down. At this point I added some spices (pumpkin pie spice mix, I think) and about 1/4-plus cup of cornstarch to sop up all the juices and prevent the filling from making the bottom crust mushy and soggy. The cornstarch is essential. It sops up all the juices from the grapes and prevents the bottom crust from getting soggy in the oven. After the cornstarch addition, I cooked the grape mixture for 2-4 more minutes.
While the grapes were cooking, I divided the dough in half, rolled out the bottom crust, and put this in the pie dish. I put the grape mixture in the dish, and then topped with the second, rolled-out, crust. I crimped the edges, put on the milk wash and sugar, and then cut several vents in the top crust.
I put the pie in a 350-degree oven for around 30 minutes. I then covered the edges of the crust with some foil (to prevent burning) and baked for another 10ish minutes. The top of the pie should be golden brown, and there should be some grape juices bubbling out in places.
