Deep Dish Pizza For A Crowd

Deep Dish Pizza’s For A Crowd

By last Thursday, things started to settle down in the neighborhood as the flood recovery efforts continued. The family next door moved in last weekend and we’ve settled into our new arrangement comfortably. 

Squeeky and Camper love all the activity and attention. Camper is vigorously enforcing his rules, despite repeated violations. Accidentally turning on a ceiling fan and unauthorized wiping of a counter are the most frequent transgressions. My new housemates find it amusing even if Camper doesn’t.

Dinners are late because my housemates are working on cleaning, discarding and recovering the mess in their flooded house, until well after dark. One of my housemates made a great Tortellini Soup. It was garlicky and delicious. I made pizzas to go with it. Here are two of the pizza’s I made.

Dough

4 cups flour 

2 tbs. instant yeast 

1 tsp. sugar 

1 tsp. salt 

3 tbs. olive oil 

water 

Sauce

1 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes

1/4 cup of extra good olive oil

1 clove of garlic, smashed and minced very fine

1 tsp. basil

1 tsp. oregano

1/2 tsp Cajun seasoning

Several grindings of black pepper

A couple of dashes of onion powder and garlic salt

1/4 red wine

1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese

Dash of Louisiana Hot Sauce

Pizzas

1 cup grated Italian provolone

2 cups grated asiago cheese

1-1/2 lb. shredded mozzarella cheese

2 hot Italian sausages, sliced

6 cups fresh baby spinach

1/4 lb. sliced mushrooms

Fresh ground white pepper

Corn meal

Preparation

Put the dough together according to my pizza dough recipe. Let it rise and divide it in half. Make the sauce by adding all the sauce ingredients to a bowl and mixing well.

Pizza 1 - This is the Deep Dish Spinach & Mushroom Pizza: Take one half of the dough and shape it into an 18” circle. Line a deep dish pizza pan with cornmeal. Slide the pizza dough into the pizza pan and kind of fold over the excess dough to make the deep edge. Cover the dough with plenty of sauce. Now evenly distribute the spinach leaves (all of them) over the sauce. Add the sliced mushrooms. Add a half cup of the provolone, one cup of the asiago and then cover that with about half of the mozzarella cheese. Grind on a little white pepper and place the pizza in the lower rack of a 450º oven.

Pizza 2 - This is the Deep Dish Sausage Pizza: Take the other half of the dough and shape it into an 18” circle. Line a deep dish pizza pan with cornmeal. Slide the pizza dough into the pizza pan and kind of fold over the excess dough to make the deep edge. Cover the dough with plenty of sauce. Add a half cup of the provolone, one cup of the asiago and then cover that with about half of the mozzarella cheese. Evenly distribute the sliced sausage over the cheese. Grind on some of the white pepper. Move Pizza 1 to the upper rack and place Pizza 2 on the lower rack.

Bake both pizza’s until the cheese is golden to dark brown. As you take the pizza’s out of the oven, have a large pizza pan ready. Use a metal spatula to slide the pizza out of the deep dish pan and on to the pizza pan. Let them sit for at least five minutes before slicing.

Note, I had a big group so I repeated the dough and sauce recipes and made Pizza 3 (a Deep Dish Pepperoni Pizza) and Pizza 4 (a Deep Dish Sausage Pepperoni and Mushroom Pizza). No, I’m not going to give you the recipes for those! Two recipes are enough for post.

Serving

Serve the pizza’s with a steaming hot bowl of Tortellini Soup. No I don’t have her recipe, but I’ll do a little sleuth work to find it. You also want a couple trays of sliced peppers, celery sticks, carrot sticks, broccoli pieces and some cauliflower. Now put out a bowl of fruit salad. For the wine, we served a bottle of Zinfandel and a bottle of Chianti. We also had three coolers full of ice cold beer. The pizzas must have been good. There were no leftovers.