ingredients

Flavor of canned tomatoes varies from brand to brand and can often have differing amounts of freshness, sweetness, saltiness, acidity and other characteristics. Everyone has a preference and some tomatoes can be superior to others depending on the dish they’re being used in. For Chicago Style Deep Dish Pizza, my fellow pizza-holics over at pizzamaking.com are big fans of a canned tomato brand called ‘6-in-1’ from a company called Escalon. I was lucky to be able to find a can of ‘6-in-1’ tomatoes at my local Dominick’s grocery. Although I loved the flavor of these tomatoes on deep dish pizza, I thought the texture of these ‘ground’ tomatoes was a little bit too ground up for my purposes. Tomatoes that you’d find on a Lou Malnati’s or Pizzeria Uno/Due deep dish pie are a little more chunky, so I decided to search for a ‘diced’ tomato to suit my needs. Escalon does make a diced version of their tomatoes, but they were not available locally, so I decided to test a few locally available brands. Muir Glen Organic tomatoes are quite good, come in a wide variety of styles (ground, whole, diced, with basil, etc.) and were available just about everywhere . If I didn’t have any other options, I would gladly use Muir Glen any day on a deep dish pizza. Long before my deep dish insanity took hold, I had become fond of a brand of tomatoes called Dei Fratelli , which I prefer to use when making my ‘world famous’ Cocoa Chili (recipe on my website) . I had been very impressed with the consistent flavor and texture of their ‘crushed’ tomatoes for use in my chili, and thought their ‘petite diced’ would work well in my pizza experiments.  I had a lot of success combining Muir Glen and Dei Fratelli tomatoes to get a really great flavor and texture, using a combination of diced and crushed/ground tomatoes.