Detroit pizza seems to be everywhere these days. Recipes are all over the internet and thick, cheesy slices have been finding their way onto restaurant menus that are nowhere near Michigan. Even the frozen pizza section of your local grocery store is likely to have one or two options on the shelves.
If you've never heard of this Motor City classic, take note. It all started at a place call Buddy's. A waitress from Italy missed her homeland's focaccia, persuaded the owner to take a shot at making one, and the result was Detroit pizza.
While its sudden emergence onto the culinary scene is hard to explain — they have been serving it in Detroit for more than 70 years — its appeal is undeniable.
What sets this Michigan version of an Italian-American staple apart from its more traditional counterparts is a combination of a thick, chewy crust, a mind-blowingly generous amount of Wisconsin cheese that forms a lacy, crispy, darkly brown edge on the perimeter, and a garlicky, herby, slightly sweet sauce that pulls the pizza together beautifully.
It's not the pizza you might expect, but it's the pizza you're going to crave from here on out.
A specific pan
Before we can discuss what goes into the pizza, we have explain the pan. Yes, Detroit-style pizza has its own pan. Legend has it that Buddy's originally used pans to bake their pizzas that originally had held spare parts, gleaned from a local automaker.
Today, you can buy a Detroit-style pizza pan, a deep, 10- by 14-inch rectangle of black metal with sides that flare gently away from the bottom. While the original pans were made from blue steel, most modern pans are made from anodized aluminum and come with a nonstick coating.
If you plan on making this pizza often, this specific pan does provide the best results, as the conductivity of the dark metal results in a crispy crust and nicely browned, cheesy edges. That said, I have had good results from a standard 9- by 13-inch baking pan.
A different crust
There are plenty of thick-crusted pan pizzas. What sets Detroit pizza's crust apart is its sturdy chewiness and open crumb.
Most thick crusts on pizzas tend toward the fluffy, tender side, with a tight crumb structure, as does a Sicilian pizza crust. The Detroit-style crust lands somewhere between this standard and a more rustic focaccia.
To achieve it is relatively easy, but you do need the right flour, and what I mean by that is bread flour. The main difference between bread flour and the standard all-purpose variety is the amount of protein — bread flour has a higher content than all-purpose does. This allows bread flour to produce more gluten, which is what gives bread dough its stretchiness and elasticity, and baked bread its characteristic chew.
The amount of water is also a factor. Detroit-style pizza dough has enough water to create a slightly sticky, looser dough than most. This allows the dough to create larger holes as it rises, which results in a crust with a lovely open structure.
One of the other alluring elements of the crust is its brown, crispy bottom, which it gets as it fries in the fat from the cheese that's been pushed up against the edges of the pizza pan. Decadent? Yes, but oh so delicious.
An unusual cheese
Speaking of the cheese, this is one cheesy pizza. Some might say excessively cheesy, but is that really possible?
And the kind of cheese matters. While most pizzas have mozzarella, one of the biggest features of Detroit pizza is the use of Wisconsin Brick cheese.
"Brick cheese has a savory, tangy, buttery flavor," says Liz Nerud, a certified cheese professional at Kowalski's Market. "The cheese is pressed by bricks during the aging process, to expel any excess whey. Hence the name, Brick cheese."
Nerud recommends looking for a young Brick cheese, which will have a milder flavor than one that is aged.
Can't find Brick cheese? Many pizza makers recommend Monterey Jack, but Nerud thinks that a young Wisconsin Fontina makes an even better choice.
While you can use all Brick cheese on your pizza, as many do, I like a combination of Brick and mozzarella, which gives the pizza a less intense cheese flavor.
One of the most distinctive features of a Detroit pizza is the crispy, dark brown edges, bordering on black. Those edges may seem almost burned, but they definitely don't taste like it. They taste like toasted cheese, much like an Italian frico or the cheese that leaks out of a grilled cheese sandwich and browns in the bottom of the skillet. Trust me, you'll fight for the edge pieces.
A fantastic sauce
For me, pizza sauce is usually not the star of the show. Its job is to provide some contrast to the rich cheesiness of the pie. If it doesn't distract from the rest of the ingredients, I feel like it's done its job.
In the case of Detroit pizza, though, the sauce is so good that it should at least get co-billing with the cheese and the crust.
Its beauty lies in the balance of the acidity from the tomatoes, the sweetness from a bit of sugar, a generous amount of dried herbs and, of course, garlic.
Traditionally, in a Detroit pizza sauce, garlic comes in two forms — fresh and powdered. While I typically don't add garlic powder to tomato sauces, I tested the sauce with and without it, and it's inexplicably better with it, rounding out the flavor nicely.
Where the sauce meets the pizza also takes a different form in this rebellious pie. Instead of spreading the sauce all over the dough, it's applied in rows, on top of the cheese. This gives each piece just the right amount, without threatening to overwhelm the cheese, or make the crust soggy.
Hidden toppings
Detroit pizza can be topped with any of your favorite ingredients, but pepperoni is the iconic choice, and definitely my favorite. The sharpness of the pepperoni holds its own with all the other ingredients, which is no easy task. And in true form, this topsy-turvy pizza usually comes with the toppings underneath the cheese and the sauce.
This makes sense, because it's baked at an extremely high temperature and the thickness of the crust requires enough time in the oven that any exposed toppings on top could get overly browned, or worse yet, burned. Still, I like my pizza with toppings that I can see, so I hold back some of the pepperoni and add it after the pizza has baked for 10 minutes. This gives the topping a chance to get slightly crispy, without being incinerated.
You don't need a pizza stone to bake this pizza, but if you have one, place it on the bottom rack and set the pan directly on top of the stone. Since one of the main features of this pie is its crispy, browned crust, the stone can only be a good thing.
Now that you've put all the pieces together, all there's left to do is gather a few friends to enjoy this addictively decadent pizza with you (although it's so good, you may not want to share), and maybe say a big "thank you" to Buddy's homesick Italian waitress.
Meredith Deeds • meredith@meredithdeeds.com.
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Recipe: Detroit-Style Pizza
