Quad Cities Style Pizza

A few months back Katie and I saw some buzz on Facebook about Quad Cities style pizza getting some national recognition. It was featured on a few slightly larger newspaper sites. A couple of those articles even included recipes for how to make your own at home. This was also of particular interest to Kirk who, since moving to Florida, often craves Harris Pizza, one of the most quintessential QC style pizza joints around. During his last visit to the QC he even bought a bunch a Harris Pizzas, froze them, and brought them back with him to Florida.

Well given Kirk's and my love of Harris pizza and Katie's adventurous culinary spirit, we decided it was worth trying out the recipes to see how close we could get. 

We had to make/mix up the dough more than 24 hrs in advance. 

The secret ingredient was malt that we'd normally use for brewing beer.

Once the dough was ready the next day, Kirk tried his hand at spin/throwing it to get it perfectly circular just like the pros.

I wasn't able to capture the "spinning dough in the air" shot, but you can probably tell by Kirk's laughing that he wasn't very successful. But it was fun to try.

Toppings added. We had one cheese, one sausage, one ground beef and mushroom, and one veggie w/ half ground beef. 

Two of the finished pizzas

The finished products, cut in the traditional QC pizza style way

We then took all the pizzas over to Kirk's family for them to try. It was a hit! We didn't get it exactly right, but it was a lot closer than I expected us to get. The dough/crust was a little too thick, but the flavor was extremely close. I was also impressed with the sauce. It too was close. The one other major change we'd make was that all the pizzas need a lot more cheese to match a true QC style pizza. I think we'll be trying again in the near future.

For those interested in trying it yourself, see below for what we did.

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For the crust and toppings we used this recipe:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/recipes/quad-cities-style-pizza/15158/

For the sauce we used the recipe from here:
http://kwqc.com/2016/02/26/quad-cities-style-pizza-gets-national-exposure/

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Other helpful hints/recipe notes: 

For the crust: 

• Warm water = hot tap water for yeast to prime in
• We used Safale US-04 yeast from the brewing store. They did not Safale US-05, which we would use next time
• We used a dark amber malt from a brewing store. Online chatter about the recipe suggested a dark malt to give proper sweetness to the crust. The dark malt we chose seemed to produce the perfect amount of sweetness, but it did make the crust appear a bit darker than usual Harris pizza. 
• We used regular paprika rather than sweet paprika...the malt seemed sweet enough
• Ice water = really cold water, no ice floating in it

For the toppings: 

• We used the designated amounts of fennel seed and red pepper flakes. It was not too spicy. The fennel seed was better on top of the cheese rather than under it. 
• We made sure the mozzarella was whole milk rather than skim, or at least 2%. We shredded our own from blocks of cheese. 
• In the future we may try a cheese mixture rather than just mozzarella

For the sauce: 

• We just followed the recipe as indicated above. We used generic brands of sauce and paste. It tasted really good. No change needed.