Interesting story in Wednesday's Trib about Chicago pizza, how it was developed, by whom, where and how all the major deep dish pizza emporia are related.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/l...0,246422.story

It's a story like all great Chicago stories, mired in dough and saucy characters.

Tim is a great guy with a lot of resources; if he can't slice through the layers of cheesey stories, no one can.

Italian sausage is the #1 pizza topping in the Chicago area (thankfully IMO), Pepperoni is #1 elsewhere in the US. I must be a true Chicago raised person as pepperoni is a pale second topping compared with sausage.

A toast to whoever invented deep dish, another slice please^

Not sure the story is completely correct, however, as one of the things I love about deep dish pizza in Chicago, is that it doesn't have "sauce," but crushed tomatoes (although the parlors themselves refer to it as sauce).

I always thought that of "Chicago" deep dish pizza as nothing more than a crude .......ization of the Sicilian style pizza I grew up with in NYC. flame throwers on!

Leave it to a New Yorker to think Little Caesar's is good stuff. And the fact that you're now in STL adds to your credibility.

Much of 3 years in Italy followed by return visits over the last 44, atop a long Winter in NYC and annual revisits to re-stoke my oven have convinced and repeatedly re-convinced me that:

A. "Deep Dish" pizza is a gross perversion, perhaps even a dangerous one, of a simple dish which in most of the US had already become so over-burdened with toppings as to have lost both identity and purpose.

B. People who demand deep dish pizza are themselves degenerate spawn of the improper commingling of genes among folks who possess no real cultural aesthetic beyond "pigging out".

C. Italian sausage on pizza? "O, Tempora! O, Mores!" Italian sausage (which in Italy is far less often encountered than in the US, but then few Italians would be very comfortable with out pepperoni either) is for surrounding with onions and peppers, either nestled in a bit of crusty loaf or served on its own. Only assorted barbarians, Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Pierced Goths (w/black lipstick/nail polish) would ruin both pizza and Italian sausage by combining them.

D. What did Sandburg call Chi? Hog Butcher to the world? No, a city of hogs and butchers, their hoggishness forcing pizza to become a tomato cobbler, while butchering the toppings.

Ahhh, for a simple Margherita, its thin crust browned to bits of charring below, taken with a heavy tumbler of unfiltered Apulian red, a dark and heady witches' wine, or better yet, a purist's recipe, a crust as slender as the wrists of a Neapolitan waif on short rations (and with no cheese at all) topped with sliced ripe tomatoes, fillets of salt packed anchovies and a scattering of crushed oil-cured ripe olives.

This is true. For lunch I may just have an Imo's Bloomin' Onion 'n Provel 16 incher..... I do believe they imported the idea of putting a deep fried onion onto a pizza from Chicago. Bravo!

Wow! Gloves off! Cage match!

I rather doubt it. I wonder where New Yorkers got the idea of Matso spread with cheese, Ketchup and (of course) fresh basil.

You all are making me want some of that pizza

Will be in Chicago for a long weekend starting on the 26th. This thread is making me very hungry. Hell, if I read much longer, I'll be making a bee-line for Gino's once I get off the rail system.

I always thought that people from NYC can't help but talk about how they're from NYC and how everything is better in NYC, even (especially?) in threads that are about a completely different city.

And now you have more evidence to back that up.

Well, that's to be expected from a bunch of insecure provincials. Heck, they put ketchup on hot dogs, and they think a sheet of burnt cardboard with some thin red and white mush spread on top is a "pizza". How sad.