This incredible homemade Chicago-style deep dish pizza recipe is an absolute keeper! That tender, buttery, flaky crust is sturdy enough to hold a heavy bounty of rich sauce, gooey cheese, and decadent toppings. If you cannot make it to Chicago, give this recipe a try — you won’t regret it! Chicago-style deep dish pizza is absolutely delicious, and very easy to make. I took a trip to Chicago and when I ate the pizza there, I immediately said, “Wow! This is exactly like the one I make at home!” Yes, I made this pizza before trying the real thing, and this is so close you’d be splitting hairs to find major differences. The crust is flaky, tender, and buttery. This is the one pizza you truly want to sit down and grab your knife and fork. I won’t get into a NY vs. Chicago pizza debate because it’s just not that deep to me. You can like both, and to keep it real, you can’t even compare the two! NY-style pizza is definitely accommodating for the fast-paced city lifestyle — grab a slice and go. Chicago-style pizza is a bit more dinner-like, requiring a knife and fork. It’s seriously a meal, and it’s delicious. Some of you may prefer one over the other and that is totally fine — but me? I’ll take both varieties please! Oh, and add Detroit-style to that list. How to make Chicago-style Deep Dish Pizza If you’re a lover of deep-dish pizza, you’ve gotta make this — it’s so worth the time. You make the dough Allow the dough to rise. Roll out the dough, then laminate it and proof it Then roll it out again, add the toppings and bake it. This Chicago-style deep dish pizza recipe makes two 9″ deep dish pies, but you can keep the second ball of dough in the fridge overnight and make another one the next day. Just make sure you allow the dough sit at room temperature a good 10 minutes before you try to roll it, otherwise it’ll snap back and be too difficult to work with. You absolutely need to get this dough nice and wide because it’ll shrink in the pan while you try to assemble it (trust me on this). This pizza should be cooled a good 15 minutes before you cut into it, or you’ll have it gush out everywhere.  This is a very pic-heavy post. I wanted to take a photo of as many steps as I could so that you guys don’t eff this up haha 😉 whisk together all of your dry ingredients… add the water and butter and with a dough hook on low/medium-low speed, bring it together. until a shaggy dough forms…like this. then knead it in the mixer until it is a shiny smooth ball that pulls away from the sides completely. this should only take a few minutes, depending on the humidity of your situation. grease a large bowl with olive oil. plop your dough into the bowl… roll it around in the bowl so that some of the oil gets all over the dough, then form into a ball… cover tightly with plastic wrap and let it double in size, about a good 45-75 minutes. meanwhile, start preparing your pizza sauce…this will take a good half hour to do and its WORTH it! take a small onion, or halve a large one like I did here. melt some butter in a saucepan over medium heat… while the butter is getting nice and happy, grate an onion…grating it produces a stronger onion flavor because it opens up the cell walls of the onion. if you don’t have a cheese grater, try to mince the onion as best as you can. that took no time, the butter is foamy and ready to be fed. toss in the onion, oregano, and crushed red pepper flakes (amount is up to you). my onions browned a little too quickly because I hopped on the phone and got distracted (don’t do what I did lol). However, I was able to save it before it burned. You do want the onions to develop a bit of color, but at a reasonable rate. After the onions develop a golden-brown hue, add the garlic and cook for about 30 seconds. open a can of crushed tomatoes.. add the tomato sauce and bring to a boil on high heat…then reduce to a simmer (uncovered so the runny juices can evaporate). after about a half hour, you should have a thickened sauce like this. Remove it from the heat and add in the basil and olive oil. This is the stage you wanna season the sauce as you see fit. Throw in some salt, pepper, etc. see how nice and thick it is? oh look, our dough has risen quite a bit! because the dough has a good amount of fat in it, we don’t need to flour our work surface. Adding more flour would make the dough tough. because this is Chicago-style, we want to develop a flaky butter crust…so we have to do a bit of trickery here…unroll the dough into a square, just like you would do for cinnamon rolls… add room-temperature butter and spread all over the surface, leaving a good half inch border. Make sure the butter you use isn’t too warm because it’ll become greasy. It should still be cool but spreadable. roll it up. pinch all of the seams together to create a “package”. then roll the log out to encase and trap the butter into the dough…do it gently! You should have something that looks like this above.. with a sharp knife or bench scraper, slice the somewhat flattened dough log in half. See what happened here? We have layers! When baked, the butter trapped inside of the dough will expand and create delicious flaky layers — so do not skip this step, it’s essential! take each half of the rolled out dough and fold into thirds, like this… gently pinch together all of the seams so that it forms a tight ball…we’re almost there… ahh, there we are. Place each dough ball side by side into your bowl, cover with plastic wrap and allow the dough to double in size again..but this time in the refrigerator. make sure you bake this in a 9″ cake pan with straight sides that are at least 2″ high. Grease it well with olive oil, and coat the sides. The oil will naturally sink to the bottom, and that’s fine. puffy dough from the fridge and hour later. Pull each ball out and let it rest for a good 10 minutes before you roll it. It’s very cold, so rolling it immediately out of the fridge will make it too difficult to work with. roll it out into a nice 13 inch circle… gently roll the dough up on the rolling pin, and transfer to your prepared pan… oops, we’re not quite there yet. Although I rolled mine into a 13″ circle, my dough was still too cold so it was starting to snap back. I left it on top of my cake pan to rest and stretch out a bit. Be patient with it. once the dough is workable, but not too warm…nestle it into the pan and create a crust that’s about a half inch from the rim of the pan…as you can see, mine started snapping back — again, it’s important to let the dough relax a bit before working with it lol. I didn’t care at this point because I knew it would stretch out again once I gently pressed the cheese into it. Make sure you press the dough into the corners of the pain so that no large air bubbles form. if you’re gonna add sausage to this pizza, make sure it’s raw — it will have plenty of time to bake in the oven, so don’t worry. It will also soak up that delicious pizza sauce and become tender bites of sausage. Mmmmmm… I threw in some basil, just because I had it. Put whatever toppings you want on your pizza…just make sure the cheese is the first one in the pool 😉 finally, top it off with about a cup of the sauce (or more if you’d like)… spread the sauce to the edge of the crust,and sprinkle it with some grated or shredded parmigiano-reggiano cheese. bake it. Mine stayed in the oven for 35 minutes…but your pizza may take only 20 to 30 minutes. Let the pizza cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then gently remove it to rest an additional 10 minutes before slicing into it. Please remember that the cheese is so super hot under that sauce, and if you cut into it too early, it’ll spread everywhere and get messy. So be patient, it will be worth it in the end 😉 she’s beautiful… look at that crust! that crust is seriously perfect. Oh my God, this was so good… I can’t even describe how delicious this truly was. Phenomenal, and totally homemade. Anybody can do this, you don’t have to be a professional (hell, I definitely am not!). Make this pizza, you guys…I’m serious…