Domino’s makes a pan pizza now which has good crust. Unfortunately it’s covered in Domino’s cheese & sauce so it’s still not a very good pizza.
Pretty much a Wisconsin chain (although some still exist in Minnesota, Illinois, and Washington), Rocky Rococo is my go to if I want a pan-style slice.
Re: Little Caesars:confused:The commercial makes it look like it’s 90% dough.
Pizza Hut is still the best.
Yeah, even for a pan pizza, the crust is pretty thick. Pizza Hut’s crust is definitely better consistency and flavor (probably because it has more grease), but Little Caesar’s cheese on their deep dish is shockingly good, considering how crappy there regular pizzas are.
Just to borrow this topic a bit. Does all type of pizzas have the same layer outline (as they serve them around here):
Dough
Tomato
Meat (if any)
Shrooms or similar (if any)
Cheese
Veggies / specials (if any)
Spices
Or are there some valid exceptions?
Is Perry’s Pizza still around? These were pretty big in 1980s SoCal (it’s where Stacy and Linda worked in Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and not sure where else they may be located. I pretty much stay away from pan pizza these days but Perry’s was delicious, at least back then.
There’s a pizza place up the road from where I work that serves what can best be described as a mini Italian meal on dough.
Chicago-style deep-dish pizza certainly follows a different order. From bottom to top, it’s typically:
- Dough
- Cheese
- Meat / veggies
- Tomatoes / sauce
Example:
Also, it seems pretty common for pepperoni (on thin-crust pizzas) to be put on the very top (i.e. above the cheese).
Although now that in think about it’s still basically sauce, meat, veggies then cheese.
Yeah, I would say it varies. Some places pretty much always put cheese on top. Some put the cheese as the second layer and toppings on top. Others do sauce on the bottom, then any ingredients you don’t want to burn or crisp up next, then cheese, then the rest. And then you have the Chicago pizza order of ingredients. Or Detroit, where the sauce is on top.
Michigan’s best pizza is Louies in Hazel Park, just north of the Detroit border, followed by Pizzapopolous in Detroit and Madison Heights.
Too bad for you.
Actually after 34 years of trucking and having had pizza in more then 35 states I have to say there is no such thing as a good chain pizza joint. Occasionally I would wish I had gotten a pizza from a chain because the local place I tried was very disappointing, but for the most part any chain pizza is way, way down the list of choices.
I worked at Chuck E Cheese thirty years ago, making pizza, and we always put sauce on the dough, cheese on top of that and then any toppings on the cheese. And that’s how virtually every pizza I remember eating came. (If the cheese was the last ingredient, the pepperoni and other toppings would be buried underneath the cheese and I don’t remember ever seeing that.)
Some of the regional chains are pretty good. Lou Malnati’s here in Chicago. Harris or Happy Joe’s in the Quad Cities. I’ve yet to try Jet’s, but they sound like they’ll be up my alley if they’re anything like the Detroit style pizza I’ve had at Buddy’s. Speaking of, Buddy’s is also a regional chain, so definitely them. The Grimaldi’s chain (there’s three different chains related to them, and I’ve tried two of them, and they were both good. Looks like one of the chains, the one owned by Frank Ciolli, is in fourteen states.) Of the truly national ones, though, I’ll generally eat something else.
Yes, it has some nice browned bits. It is VERY good for the $$.
Until last month, I thought that pan pizza and Chicago-style were synonymous. I recently learned otherwise. I now know that I do not particularly like pan pizza. I do like Chicago-style, but there’s no place that sells it within 30 miles of here.
Rule of thumb: if the crust is thicker than the toppings, I’ll pass.
And even “Chicago style” has two styles under it: your traditional deep dish (like Lou Malnati’s, Pizzeria Uno and Due, Gino’s East) and stuffed (Giordano’s, Edwardo’s, Nancy’s.) Deep dish goes back to the 40s-ish. Stuffed pizza is more recent, being originally developed by Nancy’s back in 1972, IIRC. (ETA: Close. It was 1971, according to their website.) Stuffed pizza is even thicker than your standard deep dish and has a layer of dough on top of the pie, as well (and this layer is also covered in tomato sauce. I don’t eat much of either of these styles, but I prefer deep dish to stuffed.
That, I’ve seen at a few places (Sbarro, for one). I do like stuffed spinach pizza (essentially a calzone in a different shape), but like you. I generally prefer deep dish.
Ok, just making sure. A lot of people who visit Chicago think something like Giordano’s is an example of the classic Chicago deep dish style. Depending on how you want to categorize things, it’s either a subset of Chicago deep dish (traditional deep dish vs stuffed pizza) or two different styles altogether (just “deep dish” vs “stuffed.”) Looking at pictures, Sbarro’s stuffed does look a bit different than Chicago stuffed. It appears to be much shallower and not usually covered with tomato sauce on top.
Man, Pizza Hut pan pizza was great back in the day. Now I doctor it. I order the pan version, then fry it up in a big pan at home with mostly butter and a little oil, medium heat. It’s not as good as the original was, but you get that buttery crispy chewy crunchiness back, a vast improvement.