Detroit Style Pizza Food Lab

Kenji is the former culinary director for Serious Eats and a current culinary consultant for the site. He is also a New York Times food columnist and the author of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science.

For the past year, I've been up to my neck in crispy cheese crusts. That's not a bad place to be, mind you.

When did Detroit pizza become a thing? I mean, I know that rectangular pan pizzas have been served in the Motor City since at least 1946, when, according to PMQ Pizza Media, bar owner Gus Guerra and his wife, Anna, decided to throw a batch of her mother's Sicilian dough into a blue steel pan, originally used to carry auto parts, and bake it with cheese and sauce. The pizza emerged with a blackened, lacy, crispy cheese crust all the way around the edges, and a new pizza style was born. Buddy's, the restaurant opened by the Guerras, has been serving it ever since.

You Can Make Detroit Pizza At Home

? Starting in early 2016 or so, everyone seemed to be talking about it or writing about it or opening up restaurants devoted to it. I first became aware of it back in 2008, when former Serious Eats editor and current bar pie specialist Adam Kuban included it in his exhaustive pizza style guide, but it wasn't until the following year, during my annual Michigan hunting trip, that I tasted it for the first time, at a Buddy's in Detroit.

To be frank, I don't know why it didn't blow up earlier. The stuff is freaking delicious. Let's start from the bottom and work our way up: The crust comes out crisp and golden on the bottom, with a lightly fried texture that it gets from sizzling in the rendered fat that drips down from the cheese. Next, we move on to the crumb, which is chewy, with a medium-fine bubble structure. Not so rustic as, say, a focaccia, but not quite as soft and fluffy as a New York–style Sicilian slice.

Above that is where things get a little topsy-turvy. Instead of using the sauce, cheese, toppings order of a typical pizza, Detroit pizzas are built in reverse. Creamy, tangy brick cheese from Wisconsin is cubed and applied directly to the top of the dough, where it bakes up gooey, buttery, and thick in the middle, crispy and dark brown around the edges. On top of the cheese is a sweet, thick tomato sauce, seasoned with plenty of garlic and spices and often applied in heavy parallel bands. If you order the pizza with pepperoni (the most common topping), depending on where you are, you might find it cupped and crisp on top of the sauce, or, occasionally, buried underneath the cheese, where its flavor seeps in and penetrates every bite.* It's crispy, fatty, cheesy, tangy, and glorious, especially those coveted corner pieces that give you that extra crunch.

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This is not everyday pizza. It's not every-week pizza. It might not even be every-month, if you want to live to a reasonable age. But damn, is it

Pizza. So good that it's worth a trip to Detroit just to taste it. So good that it's worth devoting months of time, weeks of research, and dozens and dozens of experiments to developing a recipe to duplicate it at home. So that's exactly what I did. Here's what I found.

I decided to start my testing by focusing on the crust. For these tests, I used low-moisture mozzarella and a jar of Rao's for the sauce. Since I already have an easy recipe for foolproof pan pizza, I started there, figuring I could tweak it to make it work for a Detroit pie. That recipe uses a basic no-knead method: Flour and water are combined with yeast (1% of the flour by weight) and salt (2.5% of the flour by weight) and mixed together in a bowl, just until a shaggy dough forms. The bowl is then covered and set aside overnight. During that overnight rest, yeast multiplies and produces bubbles of carbon dioxide that slowly expand and rise, in effect kneading the dough for you. In the morning, you wind up with a stretchy, relaxed dough with plenty of gluten development.

Detroit Style Pizza — Brian Lagerstrom

Good gluten development and a nicely relaxed, high-moisture dough lead to a very rustic hole structure, with a hearty chew and a mix of big, small, and medium-sized bubbles. It's delicious, but Detroit pizza should be a little more uniform. Still, I liked the idea of a no-knead dough, so I tried it a few more times, using different ratios of flour to water. In baker-speak, this is known as hydration level: A 60% hydration dough is a dough that uses 60 grams of water for every 100 grams of flour. My original pan pizza has a hydration level of about 70%. I tried going down as low as 60%, which made a dough that had a finer hole structure (good!) but also a denser, tougher texture (bad!).

After a few more experiments (mostly around adding a fat to the dough, with the idea of making it a little more tender), I decided to throw in the towel on the no-knead method and switch to a more traditional kneading-based approach.**

In doing a bit more research, I found that Adam Kuban had gone down a similar path years ago while exploring hydration levels in Detroit-style dough. According to him, using all-purpose flour and a super-high hydration level of 75% is the key. I mixed up another batch, this time using my stand mixer to make the dough. I started by combining the ingredients and mixing them just until they started to come together, then let them rest for 10 minutes before continuing to knead.

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This is a method called autolyse, during which an enzymatic breakdown of flour protein occurs, *** making it easier to subsequently form gluten. Think of it sort of like converting a Lego spaceship into a castle: It's easiest if you break it down completely before starting to rebuild. Once the dough was kneaded, I let it rise for a couple hours at room temperature before turning it into a greased pan (more on that pan later). I let it rest once more to allow the gluten to relax, then stretched it out until it filled out the pan all the way to the edges, before topping and baking it in a hot oven.

*** Technically, an autolyse is made before salt is added, but I've never really found a big difference between adding the salt at the start and adding it at the end.

Adam is right that high hydration is a great way to go (though I ended up scaling my water back to around 73% instead of 75%), but I wasn't fully convinced about the all-purpose flour. Because all-purpose flour is relatively low in protein, it produces a light, very tender crumb that doesn't have quite the chew or pull I was looking for.

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Swapping out that all-purpose flour for bread flour (I used King Arthur bread flour) was the real key, producing a crumb structure that was relatively open and chewy, but still squarely on the Detroit pizza end of the scale as opposed to the focaccia end.

In the past, I've written glowingly about doughs made in a food processor, and I'm happy to report that this dough also works fabulously well in a food processor. Just dump the ingredients in, set the machine running until a ball of dough forms (that usually takes about 15 seconds), then let that ball of dough ride around the blade for 30 seconds longer. You'll be amazed at how quickly it develops an incredibly smooth, silky gluten structure. If you have a powerful food processor (our review of the best food processors is right here) and are making only a couple batches of dough, it'll leave the stand mixer in the dust.

With the dough out of the way, I turned my attention to the cheese. Detroit pizza is unusual in two ways when it comes to cheese. The first is the use of brick cheese, a high-fat aged cheese from Wisconsin with a uniquely tangy, salty, buttery flavor that's hard to replace with alternatives. The second is the edges. If you've ever been to Pequod's or Burt's Place in Chicago, or, better yet, had a pizza from Windy City Pie in Seattle (incidentally, the best Chicago-style pan pizza I've ever had anywhere, including in Chicago), then you're familiar with the concept of a crispy, blackened cheese crust—the shelf of crisp, lacy cheese that surrounds the edge of the pizza. This is where the real magic of Detroit-style pizza lies, and, as I found out, getting it is not exactly straightforward.

Detroit Pizza Physical Book

For my testing, I ordered a ton of brick cheese from Amazon. If you order in bulk, it's relatively inexpensive, and worth it if authenticity is what you're after. (Don't worry; I also found some viable alternatives sold in supermarkets.) When I visited Dave Lichterman, the man behind Windy City Pie, in his Seattle kitchen a

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