Thin is in: Thanksgiving edition

three more reasons to be thankful for this year

Hello, everyone!

It’s Dennis, popping in here for a second. I knew I said I was going to take it easy this week, but The Party Cut contributor Brian Erst (follow him on Instagram!) wanted to give his thanks to Chicago’s pizza scene by sending you a three-pizzeria thin-crust round-up.

Before I bestow this pizza knowledge upon you lovely people, I just wanted to let you know that your support and subscriptions go to Brian when he writes these editions, so please consider upgrading!

This is important, because Brian’s doing some incredible work. He’s planning on covering all the styles of pizza native to Chicago, and so far, he’s done thin crust, deep pan, and deep dish. There’s more to come, and once it’s all together, we’ll have a comprehensive bank of knowledge about what makes Chicago’s pizza so incredibly special.

I think that’s worth everyone’s resources, and that’s why this newsletter exists: To share the love of Chicago food in all of its forms, including pizza.

I’m handing the mic over to Brian now, but before we begin, I am going to say that this edition includes some deep cuts (or should I say, slices?), which is super cool. There’s one pie in this roundup that’s new to me, and that intel alone is worth the look.

And yes, this edition is free, so don’t forget to share it.

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Thin is in: Thanksgiving edition

Hello again, folks.

While I’ve been attempting to get an interview needed for the next installment of Pizza Wars, I have not stopped thinking of you, loyal Party Cut readers.

I am especially thinking of you during this Thanksgiving season, as I am thankful to Dennis and you for letting me into your inboxes on a part-time basis. As a special Thanksgiving treat and as a bit of counterprogramming to all the turkey-related content out there, I’m here to offer you a trio of options for a Black Friday “anything but Turkey” change of pace.

Did you know that the day after Thanksgiving is one of the most popular takeout pizza days of the year? Everyone is either worn out from making the Big Meal the previous day, tired from fighting thru the Black Friday hordes, or has carpal tunnel syndrome from all the online shopping they’ve done. Who wants to make another meal?

And after a day of hearty eating, what could be better than revisiting those ultra-thin “tavern-style” pizzas that are taking the country by storm? I actually had a pizzeria in Belfast, Ireland, reach out to me recently to talk about the tavern-style cold cure dough process—and they did a great job making their own.

flout.pizza

A post shared by @flout.pizza

I’m not sending you to Belfast (although, if you’re going, I’d be happy to tag along) but I do want to highlight three pizzerias that have recently added cold or air-cured, ultra-thin tavern-style pizzas to their menus.

All three also serve excellent pizzas in their “normal” style. One serves fantastic artisan pies, another deep pan, and there’s a guy who makes every style under the sun. So even if tavern isn’t your thing, you’ve got options.

Bungalow by Middle Brow

Palmer Square, Chicago, IL

Bungalow by Middle Brow is a brewery by day and pizzeria by night. They also just started winemaking, with a new set of natural wines.

Middle Brow started as a funky little microbrewery in 2018 after years of contract brewing. They were drawn to the wild side of fermentation, using naturally occurring wild yeast to deliver surprising flavors, and then locking that down to create a consistent product. This long-time fascination with fermentation naturally led to an interest in sourdough, and they started a program of sourdough breads and artisan style pizzas in 2019.

This house-style of pizza is available Tuesday through Sunday and I highly recommend it, along with their bread and butter program. As a side note, Middle Brow used to have pickled eggs, my Papa’s favorite bar snack and a nostalgia fest for a kid from the North Woods of Wisconsin. Their house pies are all based on sourdough and lots of whole-grain red wheat from Wisconsin.

But they’ve recently added a tavern style pizza, available on Tuesday nights only. It’s rapidly become one of the pizza community’s most buzzed-about pizzas, and for good reason.

This version is still made with naturally leavened whole wheat dough, but one that has been developed for tavern style. Its formulation contains more oil (to allow it to be sheeted and to get to a fine degree of thinness) and a different ratio of flours. That dough is allowed to cold ferment to develop maximum flavor before going through the sheeter, and is followed by a combination of air drying and cold curing. This leads to ultra-thin “skins” of dough that are kept cool before being pulled, topped and placed in the oven in mere moments.

The toppings themselves are top notch. They have a super-flavorful cooked tomato sauce that they top with your choice of plain cheese, pepperoni, sausage, veggie mix, and there’s always a monthly special available. This month is a collaboration with Birrieria Zaragoza, my favorite spot for goat birria in the city. All pizzas are finished with post-bake parmesan.

I had a spot at the bar right across from the pizza oven, so I got to watch the magic in action. Tuesday nights are now a sellout night, so the folks making pizzas were hoppin’.

I watched them top my pie (half sausage, half pepperoni) and then place it in the oven. The pies get moved around a bunch, trying to keep them on top of newly refreshed oven floor heat and are even moved from deck to deck. This leads to an amazing crust.

It’s a little more supple than the ultra-crispy crust from Kim’s Uncle Pizza. From my own work on tavern-style pizzas, whole grain flour just can’t get quite as crisp. But it’s still very crispy, with a little more chew, and a crazy amount of microblisters on the bottom of the pie.

The tomato sauce is deeply savory and the finely crumbled sausage and pepperoni add big pops of flavor. Everything is added with a spare hand; there’s just enough to give you the flavor without weighing you or the pizza down.

This is the thinnest pizza in the city. It’s highly crushable, so you might need to order more than you think, or at least get some salads and bread as well. (You can see more pictures and my day-of review here.)

Tip: If you really want to try this style but can’t make Tuesdays, or wait for the hour-plus it might take, head on over a few blocks to Pizza Matta and order their very similar tavern-style pizza.

George’s Deep Dish

Edgewater Glen, Chicago, IL

George’s Deep Dish first hit the map with their sourdough-based, Greek inspired take on deep pan pizza.

Owner George Bumbaris had been trying to open a pizzeria since 2013, but could never quite find the right spot. After a pivot into getting a real estate license, this new access to rentals led him to a spot on North Clark that was perfect for a pandemic-era pizzeria opening. It was big enough that customers could socially distance while picking up their pizzas, yet small enough that he wasn’t wasting rent on tables that would never be used.

George really liked the deep pan style pizzas made famous by Burt Katz and Pequod’s but thought they were too heavy and didn’t like the highly caramelized cheese edge (“it’s burnt!” he says), so he worked on his own recipe based on a Greek bread called lagana, which is similar to Italian focaccia.

He went down the rabbit hole that many of us have into sourdough and natural leavening as well as long cold fermentation to maximize the flavor of the crust. Because if you are developing a style of pizza that has a thicker crust, it really needs to shine on its own.

His late brother Tommy encouraged him into turning that pizza into a calling, and would jokingly refer to any future pizzeria as being called “George’s Deep Dish.” When George finally opened his spot, he went with that name in honor of his brother, even though he’s not looking to be the spotlight of the show.

George’s deep dish pie is a thing of beauty. The sourdough and long ferment give the crust great flavor and lift, and he’s topping it with high quality ingredients. He puts a little bit of cheese on the edge for that “grilled cheese flavor,” but not the big ring of cheese you’ll find at Pequod’s or Burt’s.

Recently, George decided to add another style to his repertoire: Tommy’s Tavern Thin. And while it is inspired by the cold cure process, he goes about it in a slightly different way.

George makes a different dough for this pizza but it goes under the same sourdough and cold fermentation process as his deep dish dough. Once the dough is made and bulk fermented, it is balled and allowed to slow ferment under refrigeration for an additional six days. And it’s all the better for it.

Yeast and bacteria give off different flavor compounds when in a semi-hibernating state than they do when warm and active. Less alcohol (yes, all your bread dough is slightly alcoholic, folks) and more esters. Those esters bring notes of butter and tang to the dough.

On the morning of the bake, George removes the dough, lets it warm up, and then sheets it and air-dries it all day to develop a partly dehydrated texture. He found that cold curing the dough all the way led to a sticky final product without as much flavor.

Enough shop talk. How does it taste?

In a word: Great! George’s crust is super thin but looks a little more traditional on the bottom with a nice edge-to-edge browning. He uses a thicker, but still uncooked sauce, which has great tomato flavor and a cheese that’s specific to the thin-crust pies. I requested his top-notch sausage and Ezzo pepperoni, but George has an amazing range of toppings, and house-designed specialty pizzas.

George has rebuilt the front of his store so there is now a nice dining area if you want to eat in. It’s recommended to pre-order your pizzas Tuesday thru Saturday; with only one pizza maker, there are only so many pizzas that can cook at once. And if you want more pictures and video of me at George’s, you can see that here.

Professor Pizza at Tetto Chicago

West Loop, Chicago, IL

Anthony Scardino (aka Professor Pizza), a peripatetic pizza entrepreneur who has been sharing the gift of pizza with Chicago for nearly a decade, is best known for his ability to make many styles of pizza along with his unique niche of being comedians’ favorite pizza maker. 

I’m really not making that last bit up. JB Smoove, Bert Kreischer, Jessica Kirson, Mark Normand (the list goes on and on) all go nutty over Anthony’s pizza and they call him up whenever they’re in town. 

Fortunately, after many years bopping from spot-to-spot and running a ghost kitchen in Humboldt Park, Anthony has a regular gig these days as the pizza maker in residence at Tetto Chicago, which is a rooftop bar and terrace in the hopping West Loop. 

The pizza that originally put Anthony on the map was his pandemic-era grandma style pizza pop-up.

I’m not kidding when I say it was one of the highlights of my week to go down on a Friday or Saturday, stand by the back door of a brick building, and pick up a couple of his beautiful pies.

Grandma-style is a Brooklyn original, largely unheard of in Chicago before Anthony started making them. It’s essentially a “skinny Sicilian,” which is a crunchy pizza cooked in a square or rectangular pan, with half the dough of a traditional Sicilian pie. It features a fresh, garlic-forward tomato sauce which is laid on in stripes across the top. It’s one of my favorite styles of pizza, and Anthony makes a killer rendition. His margherita is my wife’s favorite pizza (she loves the crunch).

Anthony takes after his mentor Tony Gemignani (multiple World Pizza Champion and prolific restaurateur) and can’t limit himself to just one style. In addition to the grandmas, he’s now making Sicilians, traditional New York-style round pizza, a special collaboration deep dish with Gino’s East using their dough and his toppings (available at Tetto and Gino’s East) and the focus of this section, a cracker-thin.

Anthony’s version of Chicago style thin crust pizza is a twist on a Tony Gemignani recipe but with a whole bunch of new techniques. The recipe includes cornmeal in the dough and under the crust to amplify the crunch but he’s also doing a multi-day cold cure and a par-bake for maximum crunch.

After making the dough and bulk fermenting it, he cold ferments the dough to increase the flavor (like George does), sheets it, air and cold cures it for a few more days before finally parbaking it in the oven for 90 seconds. That’s when he removes it, tops it and finishes the bake.

This leads to crazy levels of crunch.

To me, “crisp” is a regular potato chip, which breaks against your teeth and then gives way. “Crunch” is a kettle-cooked potato chip—it breaks against your teeth and then the shards continue to break. Anthony’s pizza is firmly on the crunch side of that divide. It is probably the crunchiest thin crust around. 

None of that would matter if the toppings were underwhelming, but he’s got that covered too. He makes a number of different sauces for his pizzas. There’s various uncooked tomato sauces, a vodka sauce, soubise (a creamy onion sauce for white pies), a nutless pesto called pistou, and more.

And here’s where Anthony introduced me to one of my favorite new toppings: sweetie drop peppers. Bright red and little, they have no heat, but provide a touch of sweetness and acidity that helps cut through rich toppings like sausage or pepperoni.

The rooftop bar at Tetto is now closed for the season, but Anthony will continue to crank out pizzas for takeout and delivery, so don’t sleep on any of his fantastic pizza styles. For more pictures of the pizza and a shot of the view from Tetto, check out my review here.

There you have it, folks. Three (four, if you’re counting Pizza Matta!) pizzerias to check out as you awaken from your post-Thanksgiving food comas. Here’s to wishing all of you a Happy, No-Drama Thanksgiving full of love, laughter and family, from everyone at The Party Cut.

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Hey hey, Dennis again. That was a lot of valuable pizza intel, huh? It was the thin crust at George’s Deep Dish that I had no idea existed, by the way.

Brian’s work should be seen by as many eyeballs as possible, so if you found this information valuable, don’t forget to share today’s edition:

And of course, don’t forget to upgrade your subscriptions, everyone. Every other week is for paid subscribers; once you sign up, you get double the newsletter.

Okay, I’m very aware that today’s ran pretty long, so I’ll just leave you here with some happy Thanksgiving wishes. Go get some post-turkey pizza and I’ll hop into your inboxes next week. Love you guys.