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How to make a massive deep dish Chicago Pizza…in your rice cooker

Oona McGee Feb 10, 2024
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Look out, deep dish lovers — rice cooker pizzas are set to be the next big thing.

At the end of last month, our reporter Mr Sato blew us all away by constructing a Whopper with over 1,000 slices of cheese. That jaunt into the world of huge food left us with a fridge full of cheese, and ever since then we’ve been thinking of ways to make use of it.

Here to save the day with a recipe that’ll put a good dent in our supplies is Go Hatori, a licensed chef, who came up with the idea to make a Chicago deep dish pizza.

We were happy to let him have free rein of our side office for the task, and he began the day beforehand by making a good amount of pizza dough, using strong bread flour and the recipe that was included on the back of the pack.

He also prepared his own meat sauce, using about 250 grams (8.8 ounces) of ground beef and pork, half an onion cut into small pieces, and about 80 percent of a 400-gram can of tomatoes. He seasoned the mixture with salt, pepper and nutmeg and let it simmer for an hour or so, before packing it away in the fridge for the next day.

The pre-prep made things easier the following day, when he gathered the rest of the ingredients together.

▼ Sliced green peppers, finely chopped Schauessen, a can of corn, sliced salami and olive oil.

The first thing Go had to do was roll out the pizza, and because we didn’t have a rolling pin on hand, he made do with…

▼…a baseball bat.

Don’t worry — the bat had been carefully cleaned and sterilised, so after giving the dough a final slap to releases the gasses, he stretched it out and rolled it out thinly.

▼ Now it was time to oil the bowl of the 5.5-cup rice cooker…

▼…and push the dough into the bottom of the bowl.

▼ The next step is to add as much of the meat sauce as you like…

▼ …and your favourite pizza toppings, or in this case, fillings.

No pizza, deep dish or otherwise, is complete without a generous serving of cheese, so Go grabbed a chunk of slices from the fridge.

Separating the mound into pieces, he shoved the cheese on top of the fillings and then added another layer of meat sauce on top.

▼ Now it was time to add more alternating layers of fillings…

▼ …cheese…

▼…and meat sauce, pulling the sides of the dough up to cover the bowl with each addition.

▼ Keep going with the layers until you reach the top of the bowl.

▼ And finish with a layer of cheese.

You don’t have to use as much cheese as we did, of course, but as we didn’t want it to go to waste, Go piled it up so high he had to push it down in order to properly close the lid.

▼ Once the lid is on, simply press the button to “cook”.

After about ten minutes, the cooker let out a surprising beep so Go lifted the lid to find out what was going on.

▼ Ah, this is no good.

▼ No good at all.

The cheese looked runny and it was nowhere near ready, so he set it to cook again. This time the machine completed the normal rice cooking cycle, which took around 50 minutes, but even after that the dough was still too raw.

▼ So he set it to cook one more time…

▼ …and said a prayer to the rice cooker gods that this would do the trick.

▼ After this cooking cycle, Go lifted the lid, and found…

▼ …it was done!

The gods had smiled kindly on Go in terms of the cooking, but how would it taste? To find out, he lifted the bowl out of the rice cooker and plonked the pizza onto a plate.

▼ Though he’d been worried about leaks through the dough, the pizza was perfectly intact!

Even Go was impressed by this gorgeous result — the pizza was beautifully browned on the surface, and it stood tall at an impressive 11 centimetres (4.3 inches) in height.

▼ Could this be this the world’s thickest pizza?

The whole office smelled like freshly baked bread, but there was still one step Go wanted to complete before cutting it open, so he turned the pizza over…

▼ …and used a blowtorch to char the cheese.

With the pizza now looking the way he wanted it to, it was now time to slice into it.

The dough crunched and buckled under the knife, breaking open to reveal a flood of tantalising ingredients.

No sooner had the pizza been cut than Mr Sato appeared, his foodie senses well honed to detect the moment a dish is served in the vicinity.

Smiling with glee at the realisation that his cheese slices had been put to good use, Mr Sato gave the meal a once-over visual inspection, declaring…

▼…”Oh, this looks goooood!”

Shovelling mouthfuls of it into his gob, he showered Go with praise, barely stopping in between utterances of “Delicious!”, “Yum!” and “Cor blimey!”

It didn’t take long for our other team members to follow their noses, appearing with plates in hand to try what Mr Sato was having.

Their verdicts?

▼ “Sooo tasty”, “Delicious”, “A calorie bomb.”

▼ “This is what fatness tastes like”, “This’ll definitely make you fat”, “It’s stupidly good”.

They were just some of the comments we could hear in between all the crunching and munching that was going on. But what about Go, who’d taken the time to make it all for everyone?

▼ “This is a delicious Chicago pizza.”

It was a deep dish unlike any they’d ever tried before, leading them to dub it a rice cooker pizza. When you think about it, rice cookers are deeper than a deep dish, making it a newly evolved version of the Chicago-style pizzas we’re used to eating, and we think it ought to become the next global food trend.

▼ Take a look at Go’s video of the entire process below.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Go Hatori （GO羽鳥） (@mamiyak46)

So if you’re looking to go viral and attract attention on a social media platform like TikTok, why not give this rice cooker pizza a try? Let us know how it goes for you and what you’d fill yours with in the comments section below! Happy cooking, everyone!

Reference: BuzzFeed, Macaroni
Photos © SoraNews24
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