Fast Food Slow: Deep Dish Meat Lover's

When I was a kid, for some reason, the local Pizza Hut would always let my class or my Girl Scout troop do a tour of the kitchen, and then have us top our own personal pan pizzas with as many toppings as we wanted. It was, hands down, one of the best field trips each year. It's crazy to think that was even a thing, to let a bunch of eight- or nine-year-olds into a commercial kitchen and give them free range on the prep line.

What it did do, certainly, was indoctrinate me into a pretty loyal fan of their pan pizza, particularly of the Meat Lover's variety. What a pan pizza from Pizza Hut has going for it is the crust. It was always super crunchy on the bottom and had a lovely amount of oil.

So last week we ordered up a Meat Lover's to remissness and plot our next "Fast Food Slow" episode. The pizza arrived sooner than expected, and was pretty decently hot right out of the box. The crust, though not quite as crunchy as I remembered, was still pretty good, but it did seem really sweet to my adult palate. The sauce is meh, but the amount of salty meats and cheese makes up for it. The price seems steep at over $30 for a large delivered.

Our version will come in for a lot less and probably taste better too.

When I say "slow," I really mean it this time. The pizza dough is an overnight venture, but this version won the 2020 Recipe of the Year for King Arthur Baking Company. The key is that the cheese works as a barrier to keep moisture from sauce and toppings getting into the crust. We were pretty pleased with the results, but we have a few suggestions to improve.

We use our standard red sauce and about ten to twelve ounces of shredded mozzarella. For our meats, we use store-bought pepperoni and our homemade ham and Italian sausage. It is VERY important to cook up the sausage and ham and drain it so that you can get as much grease out of it as possible.

Here are our tweaks to the recipe:

• Use a cast iron skillet. We tried it in both a 12-inch cake pan and a 10-inch cast-iron skillet. The cast-iron skillet yielded a much better bottom on the crust, but it will take longer to bake. 
• The cook time suggested was not long enough. It probably could have gone another five minutes.
• Do remember to take it out of the pan as soon as possible and put in on a cooling rack. This keeps the bottom of the crust from getting soggy. 
• To make this a meat lover's, we put down about three-quarters of the cheese right on the dough, as the recipe suggests, then we dolloped the sauce, spread out the sausage and ham, and then put the rest of the cheese down. Finally we finished with the pepperoni.