Deep Dish Equipment

Welcome to the

Deep Dish Equipment Page!

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Below are more products from participating Share-A-Sale vendors.**

** Some items listed may link to out-of-stock or discontinued items, as kitchen supply vendors could be having supply-chain issues beyond our control. Pricing listed here might differ from current pricing from the vendor. If you are looking for something specific, you can try clicking on one of the product links and try using the product search on a vendor’s website.
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You can contact RDD on the Facebook page or comment below and I will see if I can help you locate what you are looking for.

DEEP DISH EQUIPMENT AND OTHER NIFTY ITEMS FROM:
BakeDeco / Kerekes

If links below are broken or the item you are looking for is not found, you can click on the vendor logo and search for a similar item at the vendor’s website.
photo of deep dish equipment
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I would like to buy some deep dish equipment. Do you have a kit I can order?

Not yet. I want to be able to offer Chicago Pizza baking equipment packages that you can order from this page, and don’t currently have the distribution and sales set up to do that, so until I am able to sell you the RDD Deep Dish & Thin Crust Bake At Home Kits, you can try building your own kit with items like the ones listed below.

WHAT SHOULD I GET?

For deep dish, I recommend getting yourself one or two 12 inch round deep dish or cake pans (I like the 2 inch high pans, but 1.5 is fine), a square edge turner (or metal spatula), a deep dish pan gripper, and a mixing bowl or two. If you’ve seen some of my dough mixing videos, I’m using a 3qt Oxo mixing bowl, which is a good size for a single batch of dough, and is nice because it has a rubber bottom and easy to grip handle. It’s also dishwasher safe.

For thin crust, you may also want to get yourself a pastry mat for rolling out your dough, a rolling pin, pizza cutter, and a perforated pan and/or wooden peel, and serving platters for your finished pizzas. I sent some American Metalcraft 16″ Mega Screens to friends who moved out-of-state so they could bake some thin crust pizzas at home, and they love them.

A baking stone is also a good idea too. I like the rectangular ones because they have more room to maneuver your pizza. I also highly recommend getting yourself an ample supply of food-safe gloves. I use the nitrile ones. They make dough handling and kneading a lot easier.

For more info, read Deep Dish 101: Lesson 4 – Nuts & Bolts to get a better idea
of the equipment you’ll need for your Chicago pizza baking adventure!.

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Looking for Tee Shirts and Apparel?
You can find some classic designs at the RDD CafePress Shop 
http://www.cafepress.com/realdeepdish

You can also find “PIZZA ACCORDS”
along with other designs
on tees and other merch at the 

Edward Heller RedBubble Shop!

Deep Dish Equipment Links

RDD is proud to be a new affiliate for BAKING STEEL!
It’s like a baking stone, but made out of steel!

With some practice, a Baking Steel may improve the crispiness of your home baked thin crust pizzas.

photo of Baking Steel

It looks like Fat Daddio’s put together their own “pizza perfection” baking kit, which I spotted on clearance at a pretty big discount from Kerekes, so I’m passing this opportunity on to you : Use the link below:

https://www.shareasale.com/m-pr.cfm?merchantID=57964&userID=677175&productID=1163901535

 

Sadly, I have been informed that ‘A Best Kitchen’ has discontinued their affiliate program, as their parent company is ceasing operations. 
Thanks for the memories, and the pizza pans!

ABestKitchen Logo

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17 thoughts on “Deep Dish Equipment”

    1. “as well as anything”? No, but people have used cast iron with limited success.
      I prefer to use the right tool for the job,and that tool is a deep dish pizza pan, which is going to give you more consistent results.

      Thanks for visiting the site! 🙂

  1. Hello, I am undecided on which of these pizza pans I should buy:
    [link to a non-recommended vendor for a deep dish pan made by American Metalcraft]
    or
    [link to a non-recommended vendor for a deep dish pan made by Nordicware]

    I saw your recommendations I couldn’t find them on [vendor name removed – stop giving Bezos money] I have to get them by international shipping and unfortunately I only found amazon to have decent(still expensive) shipping fees to my country.

    Cheers!

    1. Hi. Thanks for visiting Real Deep Dish. I have removed your vendor links because I have been trying not to promote certain vendors intent on world domination.

      BACK TO THE PANS…

      If this is your first time making deep dish, I highly recommend starting with a 12″ diameter, 2 inch high pan, as it will give you more consistent results, and the recipes on the website are geared for that size.

      You’ve picked two different 14 inch pans that are approximately 1.75″ high.
      I recommend looking for a 2 inch high pan if you can, but you should be alright with this if it’s the only pan height you can find from a vendor that will ship to you.
      I tend to lean toward American Metalcraft over Nordicware, but you should be fine with either.

  2. I am a huge fan of the site and recipes. I do have a question about pan color/ material. I have made both 12 inch and 9 inch size pizzas, the 12 inch in a darker colored pan (American metal craft) and the 9 inch in the Lou malnati aluminum pan (which they sell to make their mail order pizzas come out better). When cooked at the same heat in separate ovens (yay double ovens), despite the size difference and using dough from the same batch, the crust in the larger darker pan always ends up much harder/crispier. While tasty, it is not the authentic taste/texture of the pizza from the Lou’s pan. I was curious if you had noticed a difference based on pan color/material or if it is just me. If you have, do you recommend a lower heat and/or shorter cooking time? If you haven’t, I can share when I figure out what works for me.

    Thanks and keep up the great work,
    Chris

    1. Hi, Chris. Thanks for visiting RealDeepDish.com!
      I have talked a bit about this in Deep Dish 101: Lesson 4 – Nuts & Bolts.
      Darker baking pans absorb heat better than the lighter colored pans, which can cause the outside of whatever you’re baking to heat faster than the inside. As you have already guessed, you may be able to minimize the variations in your crust by lowering your baking temperature when using a darker pan, which may increase your baking time. You may also have less variation with a longer-fermented dough.



      Cake Pan Round Aluminum Straight Sided -- 2" Deep - 12"X2" - $12.75

      from: Kerekes kitchen & Restaurant Supplies



      Dexter-Russell 31648 Hamburger Turner 5" x 4" Blade, White Handle - $18.90

      from: Kerekes kitchen & Restaurant Supplies


    1. Hi, Christopher.
      I think I already answered this on Facebook page:
      You grease bottom only because you want the sides to stick to the pan until they set up from the baking.
      If you grease the sides, it can be more difficult to press out your dough and the outer rim is more likely to collapse before you have a chance to finish building your pizza.

  3. Hi Realdeepdish,
    I have a question. I know that depends on how hungry you are but usually how many persons/portions a 12\’\’ deep dish pizza is for?

    Thanks,
    Simone

    1. Hi, Simone.
      A 12 inch deep dish would be typically cut into 6 or eight slices, and serves about 3 or 4 hungry people.
      1 to 2 slices per person is a typical serving for deep dish.

      If you’re counting calories:
      One slice of deep dish sausage pizza is about 620 calories.
      That’s if you’re cutting a 12″ deep dish into 6 slices.
      If you cut a 12″ deep dish into 8 slices, each slice is about 465 calories.

      Need more nutritional info? Follow the link below:
      http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/realdeepdish-com-chicago-style-real-deep-dish-sausage-pizza-1-slice-from-a-12-six-slice-pie-107970171

  4. Hi Ed,
    I’ve watched your sites grow over the years and think you do a great job in your pizza work. Two questions – 1st:
    Why have you raised your DD hydration (water) level so high to its current 60% recommendation? Don’t see any recipes with such a high level. 2nd: Why have you discontinued any olive oil and only use corn oil?

    1. Hi, Tom. Thanks for returning!
      I’ve been asked these questions before on other comment threads like this one: https://www.realdeepdish.com/deepdishholygrail/#comment-1740

      As mentioned, before, I’ve tweaked the recipe on a few occasions, and found that more hydration made the dough easier to work with. Feel free to adjust your hydration to get your ideal dough texture. My early dough recipes had lower hydrations. You can find additional info and links to those earlier recipes at https://www.realdeepdish.com/2014/01-21-dd101-extra-always-room-for-improvement-2/

      I use 100% corn oil mostly because I prefer it, but you can keep using a combination if that’s the flavor profile that you like. When using olive oil, I prefer to use a 3 to 1 ratio, corn oil to olive oil.

      1. Wow. Sorry Ed,I hope you report my thoughts here. You do great work here, I know, but, I have a few thoughts. Here are my comments about your surprising (at least to me) comments about my 2 inquiries herein. To summarize: I inquired about (1) what I and many consider to be an unusually “high” hydration level for Chicago Deep Dish pizza on your latest suggested recipe and (2) the 100% use of corn oil w/o any regular olive oil.

        Let’s just skip the last question — for now — about use of any regular olive oil and focus on the hydration level of deep dish pizza. Your answers here and elsewhere are full of . . . “well I prefer . . . and I like . .” without the talking about the important pizza RESULT. My frank questions to you is . . . is your recommended formulation or recipe intended to give a fair and representative pizza crust RESULT for those interested in typical Chicago Deep Dish Pizza enthusiasts or not? A 60% hydration level at Pizzeria Uno/Due’s? No!
        A 60% hydration level at Lou Malnati’s? No. At Geno’s East? NO. Where then?

        1. Hi, Tom. I appreciate your input and hope I can clear some things up.

          Many of the wonderful people at Pizzamaking.com Forum would agree with you that my dough formulation was one of the highest hydrations in the Chicago Style forum, compared to their formulations.

          It may have been the highest hydration in the Chicago Style forum, but it was well within the range of several other styles of pizza dough. Google “pizza dough hydration” and I’m sure you’ll find articles from people with much more experience testing pizza recipes than me, like Kenji over at Serious Eats, and he’s testing pizza dough at 65-70% hydration.

          My recipe began as a best guess for a Malnati’s/Uno style deep dish dough, and I think I started at 45 or 50% hydration. Several tests and accumulation of clues from tv shows and other sources prompted me to make some adjustments.
          The change was partly because I had slightly decreased the oil, so I increased the water to compensate, but the main reason I increased the hydration, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is that the dough was not spreading out as easily as you see Marc Malnati press out his pizza dough when he makes pizza on tv shows, and I wanted to make this dough easier to make and use for the home baker.
          You can possibly attain a similar dough texture at a lower hydration, but most people are not going to want to spend 48 hours fermenting their dough (or even an extra 20 minutes to let the dough properly hydrate).
          You can also make your dough at a lower hydration without the ferment – you will find the dough will behave similar to a pie dough in many respects and you will also get decent results representative of the Chicago style.

          While some may disagree, I consider the addition of oil (or more oil than other styles use) to be a more important component than the hydration. I think on the latest version, I’m at 19% oil, which may be lower than other deep dish recipes. When I did overnight ferments in the fridge, I was noticing that higher oil percentages would “weep” oil out of the dough, so I figured I was using too much. My pizzas didn’t seem to miss it, so I left it at 19, but the dough became more difficult to work with – hence the hydration increase. Now, my choice to remove olive oil as part of the oil was mainly to streamline the recipe, but also partly a taste preference. While your tongue may perform differently, my tastebuds did not really pick up olive oil from my memory of recent pizzas from Malnati’s or Uno/Due. Perhaps, I should update the recipe to “vegetable oil” instead of “corn oil” and add a side note about olive oil & corn oil/soybean/vegetable oils, since the restaurants seem to vary in the oil that they use, but I preferred the corn oil crusts to any other combination of oils that I’ve tried, so that’s what I’ve got on the recipe right now.

          One more thing I should add about hydration (apologies to Columbo)-
          It is very possible that when restaurants use a 25 lb bag of flour to make a giant batch of dough, their hydration requirements might not be as high. They’re using a giant dough mixer – I’m using a spoon and mixing by hand most of the time. When I made this recipe, I make one batch of dough at a time, and don’t multiply for multiple batches, so it is possible that while my ingredient percentages work OK for a single batch or even a double batch, the amounts may need to be adjusted for a multi-batch of dough, and in that case, 60% might be too high. I try to get people in the ballpark, and let them decide if they want to make changes to to things like hydration.

          So, to answer your question – YES, I’ve eaten enough pizza in my lifetime to confirm that it is a fair representation of Chicago Deep Dish.

          On a related note:
          Do you have some restaurant insider information, Tom? If you have dough recipe information with specific hydration amounts from those restaurants, I’m certain we’d all love to see them. 🙂

          I’m always trying to make a better deep dish, but I have to adjust for baking at home, so often there are compromises and adjustments that need to be made.

          Thanks for contributing.
          Feedback is always appreciated. It makes the recipes and website a better resource.

          1. On a couple of occasions, I tried one of your earlier formulations at I think 45% hydration and all thought it was pretty good. I will definitely have to soon try your latest formulation at 60% and see if we feel its an improvement or not. I know . . . this is all work in progress and we strive for perfection. Thanks. Love the pictures of your deep dish pizzas. You are one of the few who tightly “crimp” the dough rim like it should be. Looking forward to seeing more of your good work.

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