st. louis style pizza

The first time I had St. Louis pizza was the summer after freshman year, when I visited Laura at her home there. We went to Imo's Pizza, where the region's distinctive thin crust, square cut pizza originated. This "square beyond compare," is characterized with its cracker crisp crust, a sweet tomato sauce, and their regional Provel cheese, which is kind of a processed cross between mozzarella and provolone.

A couple of months ago I got a trial issue of Cook's Country sent to me. It's a magazine put out by the same folks who do America's Test Kitchen and Cook's Illustrated. Their whole thing is to test the recipes with about a million permutations of all the ingredients and cooking methods and times, and then to detail the testing process before revealing the final recipe. Cook's Country specializes in weird regional American dishes. I wasn't too crazy about the selections in the issue they sent me, so I decided not to subscribe, but I did get pretty excited when I saw the recipe for St. Louis style pizza.

I showed it to Laura right away, and we of course decided to have our other St. Louis friend Matt over for a little pizza party.


St. Louis pizza

All in all, it was a fairly easy meal, since the pizza dough doesn't have yeast so we didn't have to wait for it to rise. I just mixed 2 cups of flour, 2 tablespoons of cornstarch, 2 teaspoons of sugar, 1 teaspoon of baking soda, 1 teaspoon of salt together, and then added a cup and 2 tablespoons of water and two tablespoons of olive oil. I kneaded it just until it came together and then divided it in half. This was supposed to make two 12 inch rounds, but I had a lot of trouble rolling it out, and then I had to cook it on a piece of wax paper, which was very difficult to peel off after it had baked. It was a little bit of a mess, but it turned out well enough. However, the crust wasn't as thin or as crispy as it was supposed to be. I think maybe I should have floured my surface more.

The sauce was simple enough. The recipe simply called for mixing 8 ounces of canned sauce with 2 tablespoons tomato paste, sugar, fresh basil and dried oregano. Not cooking it at all seemed too weird, so I let it simmer for a half hour or so. I also hate sweet tomato sauce, so I only used a very scant tablespoon sugar, rather than a full one. Even this was a major concession, as I am very skeptical of the merits of sugar in sauce. It didn't turn out bad, but I'd just as soon not use it.

The cheese was 2 cups of white American and half a cup of Monterey shredded and mixed with 3 drops of liquid smoke. This was way too much cheese, but that's probably because the I couldn't roll the dough thin enough. The American/Monteray hybrid was supposed to mimic the taste of Provel, which isn't sold outside of St. Louis. I also hate American cheese, so I would change the ratio in favor of the Monteray if I made this again. The liquid smoke was a very cool product. I have no idea how they do it, but it smells just like a barbecue. So strange.

We baked the pizza for about ten minutes at 475 degrees. Cooking pizza at such a pathetically low temperature actually made me miss my horrid apartment in the Bronx. That oven was an inferno! However, all things considered I did pretty well in the trade off.

We decked out our pizza like they would at Imo's, a vegetarian deluxe with sauteed mushrooms, onions and green pepper. If we had really gone all out we would have had bacon and sausage too, but these pizzas were completely overloaded as it was. I definitely should have made larger pizzas for the large amount of toppings we were using!

I don't remember the pizza at Imo's all that well, but Matt and Laura seemed to find it a reasonable facsimile. It was definitely a fun experiment, and I might use the dough again, but I'd just as soon use my own sauce and cheese on it, you know?

pizza odyssey

When I was still living in the Bronx, no one wanted to come all the way up north to visit. This was understandable, but perpetually disappointing. However, I have great friends, so there were occasions when they all made the trek to visit Laura and me. Generally, this happened I bribed them with food. My final stint as a Bronx hostess was no exception, as I offered our guests the best of Arthur Avenue's imported and homemade delicacies served up on a pizza.

Nathan's delicious meatsa trio

As I alluded to in an earlier entry, our old oven was a totally crazy inferno, to the point where Laura was afraid to light it. The first time I baked a cake, I was shocked to discover that it was cooked through in less than half the prescribed time. It was absolutely impossible to tell what temperature the oven was set to, and I would have to try and gauge by opening the broiler to see the size of the flame. Needless to say, this was a considerable culinary challenge when it came to most foods. However, when it came to pizza, I had long suspected that the high temperatures would only work in my favor.

creamy taleggio cheese with porcini and cremini mushrooms make the night's best pizza

Professional pizza ovens exceed 1000 degrees as a matter of course, so home cooks have difficulty replicating their results. Many bloggers have tried and failed, but they didn't have my oven. I cranked it up to full heat and left it on until my entire apartment was swelteringly hot-- no small achievement considering the jerks downstairs hadn't turned on the heat all month. Anyway, my mom gave me grandma's old oven thermometer, and the needle went past the maximum temperature of 500 degrees and back past 250 degrees before something inside it burst and covered the interior with chalky dust. Also, I got nice rubber coated pot holders for Christmas, and they actually started melting. This pizza party was intense, and probably the closest I'll ever get to making pizza parlor pies at home.

prosciutto di parma, pepperoni, polly-o and sausage

I was pretty proud of how well the whole thing came off. I made my own dough, my own sauce, and used fresh herbs and the finest toppings that Arthur Avenue had to offer. However, that is not to say that things went off without a hitch: my first pizza was actually a total mess. Jess lent me her pizza stone, so I put that in the oven to get properly hot. If you're properly equipped you use a wooden peel to transfer the pizza onto the stone. I was not properly equipped, so I thought maybe I could just drop the pizza in there on a sheet of wax paper. I tried this, and as you probably will have guessed, it immediately began to burn and melt. We awkwardly attempted to transfer the first pizza to a sheet of aluminum foil and tried again. The final product, with tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella from Casa and fresh basil and parsley, was delicious, but more closely resembled a ghetto disaster of a calzone than a proper pizza.

the first attempt: a delicious mess

However, we used the foil technique for all the rest of the pizzas with wonderful success. I ended up making five pizzas that night and seven overall. (I baked up the rest of the dough with some olive oil, herbs and a little grated cheese to make pizza flatbreads to bring to Jess and Marc's birthday). In addition to the deformed plain pie, there was pepperoni one, and several specialty pies: a porcini cremini mushroom taleggio pizza with fresh basil, a lox pizza with a sour cream, dill, shallot sauce and Nathan's home cured salmon, and my boy's prosciutto di parma, sausage, pepperoni stuffed crust send up to the meatsa trio, ingredients purchased at Arthur Ave's amazing Calabria Pork Store.


Nathan's homemade lox with fresh parsley and a dill sour cream shallot topping

The next day I also made two pizzas including a three meat pizza with Polly-O cheese (ran out of the fresh stuff!) and fresh basil and parsley for lunch. They were allllllll awesome, and so easy to make! I've recently recreated the mushroom pie as a crostini, so you can expect an elaboration in a later post, as well more on the homemade tomato sauce. Also, hopefully Nathan will also share his lox with you. For now though, I'll leave you with everything you need to know to make your very own pizza dough.


the risen dough

This recipe makes two 10 or 12 inch pizzas, depending on how successfully you stretch the dough! Bake as soon as you've topped your pizza, and at the highest possible temperature, as it will cook faster and keep the dough from getting soggy and your pizza from being a floppy mess.

Carefully stir one packet of yeast into a cup of warm water with one tablespoon or either sugar or honey. I used sugar, because I forgot my honey at my apartment and I made the dough at Nathan's because boyfriend has a bad-ass Kitchen Aid, but lots of recipes seem to prefer honey. While the yeast is getting nice and frothy, (let it sit for about 5 minutes), mix three cups of flour with two or three tablespoons of olive oil and a teaspoon of salt. Slowly add the yeast and water, mixing until they form a dough. This is easier when you have a mixer, but definitely doable by hand. After it comes together, knead the dough on a floured surface for a few minutes and then form it into a ball. Drizzle olive oil into a bowl to coat it, and set the dough in it to rise, making sure to cover with a towel or plastic wrap. The dough should double after an hour or two, after which you want to knead it again. At that point, you can let it rise again, or you can get down to the business of making pizza, giving each pizza crust a nice dusting of cornmeal on the bottom to make it less sticky. I let my dough rise again for hours and hours, and that was fine. I even refrigerated some of it over night and kneaded it and let it rise again before I finally baked it. You can also freeze your dough, but I think you have to do that before it rises. I was totally expecting to fall flat on my face with my first attempt at pizza dough, but it was surprisingly easy. Try it!

more pizza dough than you could possibly ever need