Jack Piepan: Deep Dish Pizza With Green Apple, Gorgonzola, and Bacon

Sometimes you have a nice healthy dinner all planned out and you think, "Fuck it, I want pizza." This is the pizza for you. Proper pizza dough requires a long rise (and sometimes second rise) time. Making unhealthy food decisions requires expediency. You've gotta get that shit cracking before the logic part of your brain talks you out of it. This particular recipe is best made in a cast-iron skillet (like most foods), and has a deep, fluffy crust.

The combination of toppings was inspired by a fall pizza we had a few years ago at Jockamo Pizza in Indianapolis, which is one of the best pizza joints we've ever been to. We regularly have dreams featuring Jockamo Pizza, but when it becomes fall they all feature this pizza. We can't outdo Jockamo, but this pizza is a pretty reasonable substitute.

Here's what you need for the dough:

1 packet (or 2 1/4 teaspoons) active dry yeast

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour (use bread flour if you're rolling it out bigger and baking on a pizza stone or something)

1 tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

1 cup water, at 110 degrees F

2-3 Tbsp herbs (we used rosemary, thyme, oregano, pepper and cumin)

2 Tbsp olive oil

And for the rest of the deal:

-Appx 1 cup pizza or marinara sauce, more or less to taste (I often buy a local jarred version and dress it up with garlic, wine and spices)

-Toppings (we used bacon, green apple, and gorgonzola)

-Cheese. Girl you know much cheese you want; don't look at me.

-Some sort of fat or oil to grease the pan (we used the leftover from cooking the bacon)

For the dough, we mostly followed this recipe, but added a shit ton of spices because without, it can be a bit bland. Add the yeast and sugar to a large mixing bowl. Get the hot water (our hot tap water is about 120-125, so sometimes we have to let it sit for a few minutes), and add to the yeast mixture. Set a timer for ten minutes, so the yeast has time to nom on its sugar buffet. At first it will look like this:

In that ten minutes, preheat your oven to 450, and start chopping your toppings. If you're using bacon, slice it into squares and cook it until it's about halfway done:

Set it aside on some paper towels to get the grease off, then put together the flour, spices and salt.

Once you've got everything together, mix it with a fork so the spices and salt are evenly distributed (salt kills yeast on contact, so you want to make sure it's distributed thoroughly throughout the flour and spices). By now, your ten minutes are probably up, and your yeast should look like this:

If it doesn't look frothy like this, your yeast is dead and you have to start again with new yeast, but modern yeast processing makes dead yeast nearly impossible, so probably you won't need to worry about it. Now add the olive oil and flour mixture to the yeast

Mix it up and here's your dough:

Set a timer for five minutes. In the meantime, get all your toppings, sauce and cheese together

Also, get a work space floured. When the time is up, dump your dough out on your floured surface, and knead a couple of times, until it's a smooth cohesive ball. Pat it into a flat-ish circle:

With a floured rolling pin, roll the dough out into a 1/2" thick or so circle (or as circular as you can get; honestly, it's not that big of a deal). It should be about 1-2 inches (on all sides) bigger than your pan

Get your pan greased, and set it next to the dough. Flop the dough into the pan. If you are new to this, you can fold it in half (make sure it's well-floured) and place it on top of the skillet, then unfold and shape it to fit the pan. Either way, this is what you're going for:

Put a drizzle of olive oil on it (if you like), and place the whole shebang into the preheated oven for five minutes. This is called par-baking, and it lets the dough get a head start on baking so that the toppings and the dough will be done at the same time. Okay? So set another goddamn timer, I guess. Now it's poofier and sturdy enough to hold all the glorious toppings