Months to assemble, minutes to eat

My bf and I have been meaning to make chicago deep dish style pizza for months now, but we needed to prepare first.

It started with a few books, then the gathering of baking/cutting and other implements, then gathering of the less perishable food items, like flour and crushed tomatoes, and then today we spent hours selecting cheeses, making sure we had cornmeal, etc.

Our pizza (shown above) wasn't perfect - I was a major dork and I put an extra cup of water in the dough and then I was frantically trying to scoop it out, and some of the other ingredients came out with it so I was trying to add back in some yeast, corn meal and flour, then I think the oven ran kind of hot, plus we were kind of following three different recipes at the same time (don't ask!) but in the end it was not only edible, it was very fun to make. I think we now have a Sunday pizza making tradition.

In case you want to make chicago style deep dish pizza, too...here is a list of items you may find helpful:

1. American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza - this is not only an interesting story for foodies, it has a lot of good pizza tips and many delicious recipes, for MANY kinds of pizza.

2. The Great Chicago-Style Pizza Cookbook - American Pie looked like the better cookbook at first glance, but this one has a bunch of great illustrated and captioned pages and we ended up following the instructions here more often during our evening of baking.

3. Chicago Metallic Professional Deep Dish Pizza Pan - A traditional Chicago-style pizza should be made in a heavy duty 14" pan like this one, and this one worked great.

4. Mario Batali Pizza Wheel - This is a biiiiig pizza cutting wheel, perfect for a big, thick pizza.

5. King Arthur Flour - one of my biggest regrets moving away from the East Coast is that I never got to visit King Arthur Flour in Vermont. I usually hate getting mail order catalogs for anything, but I find theirs quite drool-worthy. It's easier than going through their website. We got a bunch of stuff for the pizza here, whole wheat pizza crust mix, pizza sauce seasoning, yeast (which we didn't need), pizza dough flavor (which we also didn't need), churro mix (okay, churro mix doesn't help you make pizza. 'tth), ginger scone mix (yeah, yeah, i think it was on sale), belgian waffle mix (I promised I'd make belgian waffles...sometime) a lava cake making mix (we made that for dessert and it came out perfectly so pththththt!!!) etc...etc...I actually want one of everything they sell.

I can't think of anything else much I'd recommend. Grocery Outlet had crushed tomatoes and organic butter at a HUGE DISCOUNT because they freaking rule. We went to a specialty cheese shop and they actually told us to go to Safeway grocery store for our mozzerella cheese. I would recommend you get an oven thermometer that can both sit on and hang off of an oven rack to make sure your oven temp is reading accurately, but in general pizza making was REALLY FUN, pretty easy and has nearly endless variations, although I'm quite open to making, oh I don't know...caramel rolls or something instead if/when we run out of types of pizza.