Chicago Style Pizza on the Big Green Egg

My husband wanted Chicago style deep dish pizza for his Father’s Day lunch. I consulted several sources to come up with what we made for him.

The good thing about this pizza is that you don’t need to do much ahead, but you do need to get your ingredients ready.

The recipe I consulted from Cook’s Country had pepperoni in it, but we find it too greasy, so I found this salami at Costco (I figure we can use what is left for charcuterie):

That same recipe recommends that you microwave the sausage on paper towels for one minute.

This is all the sausage we used for our 9″ spring form pan–we should have doubled this amount.

I made some marinara sauce late in the season last year and put it in the freezer. I was obviously tired of cooking it down because when I poured it out of the jar, it was really runny so we had to cook it some more.

We cooked it for about 45 minutes, but should have cooked it longer to reduce it further. (Tasted fantastic, but made the pizza a little too watery.)

One of the recipes I consulted (on the Big Green Egg website I think) had fresh mozzarella slices in it, so I prepped that and some finely diced onion:

That same recipe called for fresh basil. (We have so much basil, so we picked more than we really needed.)

I think that I have posted this before, but just in case, our favorite provolone cheese is Bel Gioioso. It makes a world of difference in your recipes.

Now for the crust:

I used the recipe from the Big Green Egg website for Chicago style pizza–make sure to put Chicago in your search terms on their site to get you to this recipe. We followed the instructions and rolled it out and fitted it into our spring form pan.

We then trimmed the edges.

According to this recipe, you bake it at 425 for 10 minutes to give the crust a head start.

Here’s how we filled it:

Sliced provolone on the bottom and then we put the sausage, onions, fresh mozzarella, fresh basil chiffonade, another layer of provolone, then the sauce, and grated parmesan on top. Then we put it in the egg.

We had to fiddle with the egg to keep the temp at 425. It took about 40 minutes to get the crust golden brown.

We let it sit for about 15 minutes before we cut into it, but it was still pretty liquid….

We will definitely make this again and correct the mistakes we made. It wasn’t perfect, but it was delicious.