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.