This is how you make your own Detroit Style Pizza

Fluffy on the inside and crunchy on the outside. A Detroit Style pizza may be a bit underrated, but it secretly has all the components we like in food. But how do you make such a Detroit Style Pizza?

You can find numerous recipes for a good Detroit Style Pizza on the internet. These are scarce in the Netherlands, so we base our recipe on an American recipe and our own experiences. We have developed the recipe with ingredients that are easily available in the Netherlands and have adapted the measurements to European standards (grams and milliliters instead of cups or teaspoons ). At the bottom of this page you will find a video showing the entire process.

Detroit Style Pizza Ingredients

The base of every pizza is of course the dough. For a Detroit pizza, this one is far from complicated. Below you will find the ingredients you need for a well-filled Detroit pizza pan for 4 people :

• Flour (300 grams)
• Sugar (9 grams)
• Yeast (7-9 grams)
• Water (room temperature, 230 ml)
• Salt (8 grams)
• Cubes of cheese (150 grams, mature cheese)
• Grated cheese (150 grams, dry mozzarella or other harder cheese with a relatively high fat percentage)
• Optional: Sliced ​​pepperoni or salami.

Dough preparation

We start by making the dough.

1. Place the flour in a large bowl and add the sugar and yeast. Mix well with a whisk or fork.
2. Now slowly add the lukewarm water to the flour mixture. This is easiest when you use a stand mixer with a dough hook. In that case, set it to low speed and add the water slowly. When mixing the dough by hand (or spatula), add the water in steps while mixing.
3. After 2 or 3 minutes you will have a rough dough ball. Cover the bowl with a damp cloth or cling film and let it rest for 10 minutes. After resting, add the salt. Now you will mix the dough on high speed for 8 minutes until you have a nice dough. Please note that the dough is quite sticky due to the high percentage of water. Don't be alarmed by this and throw it on surface that has been generously sprinkled with flour so that the dough does not immediately stick.
4. Wet your hands or sprinkle with olive oil so that the dough sticks less to your hands. If the dough eventually sticks too much to the table, simply add extra flour. Knead the dough until you have a relatively smooth dough and then place it in the Detroit Style Pizza pan from Lloydpans that you have rubbed with plenty of olive oil.
5. Cover the greased pan and dough with cling film so it can relax. This is necessary because otherwise you will not be able to spread the dough over the bottom of the pan.
6. After 15 minutes the dough will be relaxed enough to spread all the way to the corners of the pan. Dip your fingertips in olive oil and use both hands to spread the dough. Do not pull the dough, but divide the dough by massaging it with your fingertips until the entire base is covered, including the corners.
7. One of the most important steps to get a nice, fluffy Detroit Style pizza is to let the dough rise for a while. Cover the dough and pan with clilng film and let rise at room temperature for 2-3 hours. This causes the dough to double or triple and become fluffy during baking.

Tomato sauce

We can now leave the dough for what it is and so in the meantime we focus on the sauce that will later be applied to the pizza. This process is even easier than the dough, because we prefer to keep it as pure as possible. All you need is the following:

• Peeled tomatoes (1 can, San Marzano preferably)
• Garlic (2 cloves)
• Oregano dried (to taste)
• Pinch of salt and pepper

Place the ingredients in a bowl and blend until completely combined. You can use this "raw" sauce as is, but you can also cook it a bit so that it thickens. We don't think this is a must, but it does make the sauce a little thicker and more intense.

Preparation Pizza

Now we are going to finish and bake the pizza. Follow the steps below:

1. After the dough has more than doubled in size, remove the cling film from the pan. Now divide the small cubes and the grated cheese over the dough. The sauce comes later, unlike almost all other styles of pizza. Make sure there is plenty of grated cheese all the way to the edges and corners, because this will create the famous cheese crown of the Detroit Style pizza.
2. Now add the tomato sauce in long vertical stripes. These are the so-called racing stripes . How Detroit can it be? You can also add the sauce after the dough and cheese have been baked, but we only recommend this if you have allowed the tomato sauce to reduce and is therefore thicker.
3. An optional step is to add slices of pepperoni or salami. According to the traditional recipe, these can even be placed under the cheese (on top of the dough), but we prefer these on top of the pizza so that they become nice and crispy.
4. The pizza now goes into the oven. Preferably for 15 minutes at 250 degrees Celsius on the lowest rack. If your oven only goes up to 220 or 230 degrees Celsius then your pizza may need to stay in the oven up to 20 minutes. When you see that the edges are really dark brown, the pizza is basically ready.
5. Now remove the pan from the oven with a pizza pan gripper . Let the pizza cool for 5 minutes inside the pan and loosen the pizza from the pan with the compact Lloydpans pizza peel . Using the same peel, scoop the pizza from the pan onto a cutting board. The edges can be nice and dark. Then cut the pizza into straight pieces with the large Lloydpans pizza knife . Hear that crunch!

Enjoy this delicious Detroit Style Pizza.