How to make a Detroit Style Pizza

Everyone has their favourite style of pizza, right? We talk a lot about classic Neapolitan pizza here at The Pizza Oven Shop, but your pizza oven is capable of so much more. Detroit style pizza certainly divides opinion, and with its thick crust, signature crispy cheese edges and rich tomato sauce stripes draped on top, it couldn’t be more different from the light aerated crust of Neapolitan pizza. Detroit-style pizza got its distinctive look and texture from being baked in blue steel automotive trays in the 1940s, and it’s dead easy to emulate using a good quality pizza pan or deep baking tray, and of course, your wood or gas-fired pizza oven.

The Dough

Dough is a usual sticking point for many pizza newbies, especially when trying to create classic Neapolitan dough with its high levels of hydration. This is because there are so many factors at play. Certain types of yeast have different levels of fermentation. The temperature of the room where you make the dough can play a part too, as well as the way you knead and stretch the dough. You’ll be pleased to read that these factors are much less important with Detroit-style pizza dough. In fact, we’d go as far as to say you can’t really mess it up!

With Detroit-style dough, there’s no need to stretch it into the perfect shape and no worries about it sticking to the peel when launching. All you do is throw it into a greased tray, making sure it’s stretched across the full surface. Simple!

The Cheese

We can all agree that the signature (and best!) part of a Detroit-style pizza is the crispy, cheesy edges. Traditionally, brick cheese is used, which is a semi-soft cow’s milk cheese that originated in Wisconsin. However, it’s quite tricky to find outside the US, so we use a combination of block mozzarella and Monterey Jack cheese. When the cheese is added to the tray, it’s important to completely cover the dough and make sure the cheese is right up to the sides of the tray. This is what allows the cheese to seep down in-between the sides of the tray and the dough as it cooks, creating those amazing crisp edges. 

The Sauce

One of the biggest distinctions of Detroit-style pizza is the order in which the sauce is added. Instead of adding the sauce on top of the dough, then topping with cheese, we flip that on its head for this one. The order for this style is dough, then cheese, then sauce. Weird, right? Trust us, it works! The way the sauce is added is different, too. Rather than evenly covering the cheese, you’ll want to ladle two ‘racing’ stripes lengthways across the top.

The sauce itself is different, too. Detroit-style pizza sauce is rich, thick and full of flavour. We often talk about simplicity when it comes to pizza sauce, but we’re throwing that rule book well and truly out of the window! We’re talking about loads of garlic, onion, herbs and even chilli for an added bit of background heat. Detroit pizza sauce is a complex thing, which takes a little time to get right, but it sure is worth it!