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Lou Malnati's-Style Deep Dish

Prep 30 min + 3–5 hr dough rest · Bake 25–30 min · Makes one 14-inch deep dish (1.5-inch sides) · Life stories: 0 · Sauce: on top
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The Dough (Butter-Crisco Crust)

Ingredients

  • 463g all-purpose flour
  • 213g warm water (~110°F — 20–30 seconds in the microwave)
  • 88g corn oil
  • 18g olive oil
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • ½ teaspoon sugar
  • ¾ teaspoon active dry yeast
  • Butter-flavor Crisco (critical), for greasing the baking pan

Steps

  1. In a bowl, mix the yeast, warm water, and sugar. Let it sit about 5 minutes, until the yeast starts to foam a little.
  2. In the bowl of a stand mixer, blend together the dry ingredients (not the yeast solution yet).
  3. Add the oil and mix with a spoon until just barely incorporated.
  4. Add the yeast-and-water solution and mix with a spoon until just barely incorporated.
  5. Switch to the dough hook and mix just 1–2 minutes, until a tacky dough forms.
  6. Preheat the oven for just 30 seconds — only enough to warm it up and create a warm environment for the dough.
  7. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a towel and let it sit 3–5 hours. There isn't much yeast here, so it won't rise much — this step is as much about building flavor as it is about getting some rise.

✏️ This dough is sized for a 14-inch round pan with 1.5-inch sides.

Component: The Sausage Patty

Ingredients

  • 2 lbs pork sausage (or sweet Italian sausage if you don't want to mix your own)
  • 2–6 cloves garlic, minced (garlic is great — use as much as you like)
  • 1 tablespoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1 tablespoon sugar
  • 2 tablespoons fennel seeds, toasted dry in a pan 1–2 minutes
  • 2 teaspoons marjoram
  • Optional: 2 tablespoons red-pepper flakes (only if you want some heat)

Steps

  1. Preheat the oven to 425°F.
  2. Mix all the ingredients by hand in a big bowl (a food-prep glove helps) until the seasonings are fully incorporated.
  3. Put parchment paper down on a cutting board and set the sausage ball on top.
  4. With a gloved hand and a big glass cup, roll and press the sausage into a ¼-inch-thick patty, as close to 12 inches across as you can — you want it to reach nearly to the sides of your pan.
  5. Slide the parchment onto a big sheet pan and bake 10 minutes.
  6. When you pull it out, pat the sausage with paper towel to remove as much grease as you can, so it doesn't make the pizza soggy.

Component: The Sauce

Ingredients

  • 28 oz can crushed tomatoes
  • 4 fresh basil leaves, well chopped
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • Salt, to taste
  • Sugar, to taste

Steps

  1. Add all the ingredients to a small pot, bring up to a simmer, simmer 5 minutes, then pull off the heat.
  2. Don't break up the chunks.
  3. Critical: drain the excess liquid before it goes on the pizza. Too much water puddles in the middle and can make it soggy.

Assembly & Bake

Ingredients

  • The dough (above)
  • The sauce (above) — you might not use the full 28 oz can
  • The sausage patty (above)
  • 2 logs of sliced mozzarella (see the Galbani tip)
  • Fresh grated pecorino (as much as you want)
  • Butter-flavor Crisco, for the pan

Steps

  1. If you're making the sausage patty, put a pizza stone in the oven and leave it there while the sausage cooks and until you're ready to build the pizza.
  2. Generously coat the pan with butter-flavor Crisco, including up the sides.
  3. Place the dough in the pan and press it out, taking it up the sides about 1 inch (not all the way to the top). Try to keep the dough an even thickness across the whole pan so it cooks evenly.
  4. Layer it: pecorino, then mozzarella slices, then the sausage patty, then more mozzarella slices, then the sauce, then more pecorino.
  5. Set the pan on top of the hot pizza stone and bake 25–30 minutes. If the top starts to brown too fast, lay foil over the top of the pan to let the bottom catch up.
  6. Out of the oven, leave it in the pan at least 5 minutes before pulling it onto a cutting board.
  7. Then leave it another 5 minutes on the board, so the cheese cools enough that it doesn't slide off when you cut it.

TIPS — from a person who has actually made this

  • Butter-flavor Crisco is critical — unfortunately, it's the single most important part of the whole process. Bonus: the leftover Crisco makes fantastic cookies.
  • Corn oil is critical too — the second most important part of the whole process.
  • For the mozzarella, use Galbani Italian-style logs — the roundish block sometimes labeled “classic melt & stretch,” found near the cheese slices. It melts better than shredded and looks less plasticky than the rectangular low-moisture bricks. Target's store brand is a solid stand-in.
Lou Malnati's-Style Deep Dish
Out of the oven, sauce riding on top where deep-dish keeps it. Fourteen inches across, an inch and a half deep — structurally a casserole that happens to be pizza.
Lou Malnati's-Style Deep Dish
The build, early: pecorino dusted on the crust, then mozzarella slices shingled across the bottom. The cheese goes under everything — that's the whole trick of the style.
Lou Malnati's-Style Deep Dish
The sausage goes on as one continuous par-cooked patty pressed nearly to the edges — not crumbles. This is the Lou Malnati's move, and it is not negotiable.
Lou Malnati's-Style Deep Dish
The cross-section, which is the only argument that matters: crust, a full layer of cheese, the sausage, then sauce. Inches of it.
⚠ AI-Generated Nostalgia — 0% True

The Family Story Nobody Asked For

Every food blog has one. Ours is at the bottom, where it belongs, and was written by a robot with no family. Reading it is strictly optional and mildly discouraged.

There are people who eat Lou Malnati's and there are people who have a system for eating Lou Malnati's, and my uncle Craig belongs firmly, evangelically, to the second group. To Craig, Lou Malnati's was never a restaurant you sat down in. It was a logistics operation you executed. The pizza was to be ordered, retrieved, and eaten at home, under your own roof, in conditions you personally controlled — 'safely,' he called it, as though a deep-dish left the building with an armed escort.

He had rules, and the rules were not up for discussion. The crust had to be the butter crust; there was no second option, and to propose one was to reveal something unflattering about your character. The sausage had to be the patty — one continuous layer, edge to edge, not crumbles scattered around like an afterthought. Craig could tell from the first bite whether a place had cut a corner on the patty, and he would tell you, at length, whether or not you had asked.

But the load-bearing rule, the one Craig would die on a hill for, concerned the slicing. Under no circumstances were they to slice it at the store. He said this to the person taking the order every single time, slowly, the way you give a phone number to someone you don't trust to write it down. 'Do not cut it.' A deep-dish, Craig maintained, travels better whole — the structure holds, the cheese stays put, the sauce doesn't go looking for the exits — and you cut it yourself, at home, once it has rested and composed itself. A pre-sliced deep-dish, in his view, was a pizza that had given up on the drive home before it left the counter.

Every so often someone in the group would order thin crust — begrudgingly, quietly, the way you confess something. Craig met this with more sadness than anger. Thin crust at Lou Malnati's was, to him, a category error: not wrong exactly, just a waste of a perfectly good deep-dish opportunity. (If you wanted thin crust done right, everyone in the family understood, you didn't go to Lou Malnati's at all — you went to Barnaby's. But that is a different pizza and a different grandmother's settled law, and we do not cross the streams.)

The drive home was its own ceremony. Craig carried the box level with both hands like a man carrying a sleeping child, and he had firm opinions about who was permitted to hold it (nobody, usually; it rode buckled in the front seat, once, memorably). He narrated road conditions as threats to the pizza. Speed bumps were discussed in advance. He once took a longer route home specifically to avoid a left turn he considered structurally unsound for a box with sauce on top.

What none of us had the heart to tell Craig for years — and what this recipe finally makes plain — is that the entire logistics operation was solving a problem you can simply decline to have. Make the deep-dish at home and there is no drive. There is no box. There is no one at a counter poised to cut it against your wishes. It rests on your own counter, un-transported, un-sliced, entirely safe, exactly as Craig always wanted, having gone precisely nowhere.

So here is the butter crust, and here is the patty, edge to edge, the way it is supposed to be. Bake it, let it rest the way Craig would insist on, and cut it yourself — at home, on your own board, on your own terms. No middle man. No 'travels better.' Nothing to protect it from. The recipe is above, where you found it, and it never has to leave the house. Craig would call that, at long last, safe.

The End. The recipe was above, where you already found it.