St. Louis-Style Pizza

 31 August 2021

Recipe from February 2010 Cook's Country

I've made several different kinds of pizza and written about them in this blog—New York pizza, one-hour pizza, Chicago pan pizza, Chicago thin crust pizza, Detroit-style pizza, French Bread pizza, grilled pizza, cast iron pizza, and probably more—and enjoyed making and eating pretty much all of them. So when I learned there was a St. Louis-style pizza I knew that I would want to try it, too. 

This is a thin-crust pizza made with a dough that does not include yeast. After turning on the oven, a no-cook sauce was made by mixing together canned tomato sauce, tomato paste, chopped fresh basil, sugar, and dried oregano. Next, the dough was made by mixing together flour, cornstarch, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Water and olive oil were mixed together then stirred into the flour mixture. The dough was kneaded briefly until it came together. Half of the dough was rolled into a very thin 12" circle on parchment paper. The dough was topped with half of the sauce and a mixture of grated mozzarella cheese, Monterey Jack cheese, and a little liquid smoke. (The recipe specified shredded white American cheese but I couldn't find that. The St. Louis recipe used Provel cheese which is not widely available. So what I made is my version of the Test Kitchen's version of St. Louis pizza.) The pizza was baked for about 10 minutes on a pizza stone that had been heated in a 475° oven for about 10 minutes. The remaining dough, sauce, and cheese were refrigerated and used to make a second pizza after two days. Total time to prepare the pizza was just an hour.

The very thin crust was nice and crisp but with some chew so it was not as dry and crispy as a saltine cracker. The liquid smoke, just three drops, provided just a hint of smokiness but otherwise the toppings were not very distinctive. This pizza was probably the easiest and quickest to prepare of any pizza recipes that I've tried. We enjoyed it better the second time, giving it a few more minutes in the oven to crisp up the crust improved it. Nonetheless I don't expect to be making this again, I prefer the flavor of a good yeast-dough crust and miss it in this pizza.