Pizza: Thin crust, NY italian style or deep-pan Chicago style?

[iMartini]

I've lived in both NYC and Chicago, and like both styles of pizza. Chicago-style deep-dish or stuffed pizza is great when you want to go to a restaurant and make an event out of it; NY-style is great for lunch or for grabbing something quick for lunch.

In Chicago, I was particularly fond of Gino's East and the original Uno's on Wabash. (There are other Uno's locations nationwide, but they have nothing in common with the original except that they bought the naming rights. IMO, their food isn't nearly as good.)

For Chicago-style thin crust pizza, an outfit called Chicago's Pizza did a pretty good job. The biggest difference between Chicago-style thin crust and NY-style is that in Chicago, the crust tends to be crunchier, and the pizza is almost always cut into bite-sized squares.

Here in NYC, I've had some very good pizza and some very bad pizza. The best pizza I've had in the city so far are from two little hole-in-the-wall places whose names I can't even remember. One is at the corner of 6th Avenue and 22nd Street, and the other is on the south side of 14th Street just east of Union Square.

All that said, some of the best pizza I've ever had anywhere has been in Philadelphia and South Jersey. King of Pizza in Cherry Hill, NJ is worth a visit, and in Philly, I was a big fan of Mad Greek's near the Penn campus, and Fiesta Pizza up in East Falls.

The difference between Philly-style and NY-style is fairly subtle, but it seemed to combine a slightly crunchier crust with a thicker layer of toppings.

 

[jamesi]

And why?

We can't get proper Chicago pizza in London so I have to go for thin crust, although if the crust is stuffed, that's OK too.

I mean, c'mon... honestly — does this look like a pizza?

shame about not getting proper chicago pizza in london, i got to grow up with it for 15 years. stuff crust = pizza hut to me. ohh dont get me started on this none hot dog stand i used to go to

 

[Butthead]

Thin. I prefer real Italian pizza, the crust is just so much better and there is barely any grease. Best pizza I ever had was at some small restaurant in Florence, although the place in Venice was almost as good.

In America my favorite pizza is from Buca di Beppo, closests I could find to real Italian but still not as good.

So. Cal? Then try Antica Pizzeria in Marina Del Rey sometime, though I'm not a fan of their 'proper' Napolenian pizzas as directly out of the wood burning oven of some 800F, the crust in the center is very thin and flabby. Nice flavor and texture, but the center just limps all over you. It needs to be taken home and re-heated in an oven using a wiremesh pizza rack, until just a slight crispiness is obtained in the center (tricky to do without turning the edges brown and cardboard texture).

Buca di Beppo is a restaurant chain. Chain restaurants really can't afford to have trained personnel, doing artisinal baking....ergo, you can't get a great pizza from any of them. Frozen thin pizzas are even more of the 'cardboard' inflexible and terrible tasting crust.

www.sliceny.com blog is still the best site for pizza news/reviews/recommendations.


Pining for a perfect pizza
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8514122/

So if you're a deep-dish person, you probably want to click away before you read another word (to this defense of the Chicago pie , for instance). Because I firmly side with Ed Levine, who holds that deep dish is at best a “mighty tasty casserole” — sharing little in common with the true Neapolitan, or Neapolitan-American, form of this most infallible food.

Should you think that Levine, author of "Pizza: A Slice of Heaven" (Universe, $24.95), has it out for the Second City, know that he heaps ample praise on Chicago's other pizza style, the thin-crusted joys that emerge from ovens at South Side joints like Vito & Nick's. And he has equal derision for frou-frou chefs anywhere who pound dough cracker-thin and serve up pies as firm as a Frisbee.

"There's no art to that, and there's no art to making Chicago-style deep dish pizza, either. It's like a brown-and-serve roll on steroids," Levine says.

Here's a reverse engineered NYC-Neopolitan pizza recipe. Note however, that the current fad of using burrata cheese on a pizza is a waste of money, IMHO. Go with freshly imported from Italy, quality bufala mozerella cheese instead..much better flavor subtleties. *warning* hardcore pizzapr0n at this link, NSFW or anywhere else for that matter

http://slice.seriouseats.com/jvpizza/



http://www.weirdasianews.com/2007/05/29/japanese-ice-cream-cone-pizza/
Seems 'cone pizza' may have originated in Italy of all places, by Kono pizza?

but according to poster on sliceny,

http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2006/06/pizza_cone.html

{hmm, there's a link to the flicker acct where the photo was 1st posted of the cone pizza shop in Seoul, but I can't d/l the image or get it to display here...strange that flicker would be blocking this somehow?}

pizza in a cone concept was first developed, trademarked, registered in the US by Nir Adar. The concept is over 4 years old and you could see the results on www.crispycones.com as well as on conopizza.com and pizzacono.com the cones will be coming to your area soon enough, no need to go to Korea.
—Posted by: niradar at 11:41PM on 07/11/07

/

Crispycones...ewwww, there's one in the burbs of LAla land, in Arcadia apparently. And I thought CrispyCreme was bad enough
http://losangeles.broowaha.com/article.php?id=1659
But even a cone pizza (popular in S.Korea for some reason) would be a great pizza if eaten with a side of Hyori hottie

 

[SactoGuy18]

Folks,

Any of you who are fans of the History Channel probably may have seen an episode of American Eats that specifically talks about pizza.

It is of my opinion there are these distinct styles of pizza known nationally:

1) Original New York style--few toppings, with foldable slices to make it easier to hold and eat. It's fairly closely related to the pizza that came from Italy with the Italian immigrants of the late 19th and earlty 20th Centuries.

2) Multi-topping style--a large variety of toppings, became popular in the 1920's from pizza restaurants just outside New York City by first-generation descendants of the original Italian immigrants.

3) Chicago deep-dish style--invented in the 1940's, this is where one to two slices literally is very filling. A variation of this became stuffed pizza in the 1970's.

4) California style--invented in 1980, this style of pizza encompassed many non-traditional fillings but uses New York-style pizza crust.

I'm a big fan of deep-dish style pizza.