Deep Dish Pizza (Test: Does It Pass The Breakfast Challenge? Answer: Yes!)

Cold pizza for breakfast is one of seven wonders of the world in my opinion.

I'll take a good, homemade pizza over a frozen box of cardboard any day. I think the last time I had a frozen pizza was over five years ago. I am in constant search for THE pizza dough like I search for THE chocolate chip cookie recipe. A deep dish pizza dough has to have crunch on the outside, chewy on the inside and has a bit of a "sour" bite in your mouth after. Thin or thick crust--the be all, end all to fine pizza is the crust.
 
Here's what doesn't work for pizza dough for me: soft dough after baking, drooping crust allowing all the hard work of "dressing" the pizza up fall into a clump on the center of a plate. Nothing is worse than staring at a naked pizza dough! Toppings are important, but I'm pretty traditional in my wants as far as that goes--sausage, onion, pepper, red sauce. What really takes a good pizza to great is how much raving goes on not the evening it is served hot from the oven--but the next day as breakfast!
 

Having been raised just outside of Chicago, I was smitten with the "deep dish" variety of pizza from an early age. If you have a food memory this profound, your quest for perfection will lead you down many paths in replication attempts--at least that's true for me.

Pizza, I have found, can be used as a geographical marker. I learned this first hand as my mother drug us kicking and screaming into the southern tier state of Missouri from the North where pizza here was as flat as Kansas, topped with something called "provel" cheese AND (horror of horrors)--sliced into tiny squares! I remember my first reaction to tasting St. Louis pizza. It was bland, I couldn't tell whether I had gotten a piece of the cardboard in my mouth, or whether the thing I tasted was actually the pizza dough itself. It left me hungry, and the cheese that topped the pizza was something from another planet entirely. (Provel: a cheese unique to St. Louis whereby cheddar, Swiss and provelone are combined to give a very melty, salty some say "tasty" cheese topping.) Provel shows up here about as often as hot summers do--always.

So I set out to find the best deep dish pizza crust I could--with memories of Chicago on my mind. I've tried many deep dish varieties. Some have baked up so thick that they could have passed as focaccia. Some recipes had so much cornmeal in the base, they could have passed for cornbread. I was hitting walls with this one. 

Then I ordered the America's Test Kitchen 10th Anniversary Cookbook and found exactly what I'd been looking for! A deep dish pizza crust that has all of the makings of perfect deep dish quality pizza dough. And the "special" ingredient here: potato. That's right--potato. One potato, peeled, boiled, then put through a ricer, then measured out very loosely, and added to the flour, yeast, water and salt. Viola--you have one of the best recipes for deep dish pizza I have ever tried! (You can access the recipe here.) The ATK folks like you to sign up or become a member and therefore, have access to ALL the many wonders of their recipe aresenal--free for two weeks. To me, this is worth it. But I bought the cookbook after watching ATK on PBS Create one afternoon where they had an offer I could not refuse. (Get the 10th Anniversary Cookbook--that's ten years of recipes, PLUS the collection of season 10 DVDs all for $29.95!) I love the Test Kitchen. Not always--especially when they go through their "meat" phases--but for overall cooking wonder and perfection--they test, they taste--it works, what can I say.

As for my "vegan-izing" the deep dish sausage part (and this was easy-peezy, trust me)--I used Gimme Lean Sausage. This pizza dough will take you about three hours all told to mix, let rise, then proof. The secret ingredient in their dough is that potato. Be sure to have one russet potato on hand!

Vegan Deep Dish Italian Sausage Pizza

1 recipe of America's Test Kitchen Deep Dish Pizza Dough

1 package of Gimme Lean Vegan Sausage

1 can whole plum tomatoes (drained and chopped)--or use fresh tomatoes

1 red onion sliced thin

5 cloves of garlic, sliced thin

S & P to taste or Spike Seasoning (about 2 teaspoons)

1 teaspoon crushed fennel seed

2 teaspoons dried oregano

10 leaves of fresh basil sliced thin

extra virgin olive oil

Daiya Mozzarella Cheese (for topping)

Saute the onion and garlic and sausage in about 2 tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat until the sausage browns a little around the edges and the red onion begins to soften. Add the seasonings and cook a few minutes longer. Remove from heat. Take the drained tomotoes and spread evenly over the pre-cooked pizza crust. (*Note--per the directions of ATK, you pre-bake the crust for a bit so it holds up the ingredients and does not leave you with a mushy crust--this worked really well!). After the tomatoes are spread over the dough, add the sausage mixture evenly over it, then spread your vegan cheese around. Bake for about 15 minutes--per the directions from ATK. Yum!