With all the moving fun and wedding planning madness, it has become a rare treat to make dinner and sit down together to enjoy what we made. Because we’ve never seen Season 4 of Top Chef, K bought the DVDs and we set about making a meal from the group’s first Quick Fire challenge — Chicago deep dish pizza.

Recipes from Season 4 are hard to come by because Bravo took a lot of them offline to have options for their Top Chef cookbooks. Fortunately our Quick Fire cookbook includes the recipe for chef Antonia Lofaso’s deep dish arugula, burrata and prosciutto pizza.

We had to go with the “pop open” pizza dough in a can because we couldn’t find fresh or frozen pizza dough, but it worked pretty well especially in my Springform (aka cheesecake) pan. I made the rectangle of dough as circle-y as possible and pieced the extra dough up the sides of the pan. We then baked the crust for a few minutes until the dough was puffed up and just slightly brown. We didn’t want soggy, underdone crust — especially in the middle (I’m lookin’ at you Punch Pizza!).  

K roasted tomatoes while I shredded mozzarella and fontina. When we were done, we started assembling our masterpiece. Lightly baked crust, layer of shredded cheese, layer of roasted tomatoes, repeat.

We had to use mache instead of arugula because it was what they had at the store, but we fried it up according to the recipe (and much to our delight). I sliced the burrata cheese (fresh mozzarella wrapped around thick cream) and placed it over the top of the pizza, sprinkled the fried mache on top and K peppered the entire thing with the prosciutto he’d sliced. We popped the whole pile in the oven for about 10 minutes and waited very impatiently because who doesn’t like three different kinds of melty cheese?! 

The thinner edges of the pizza crust were getting too brown so we covered them with foil for the remainder of the cooking process.

When the pizza came out of the oven, we shredded some parmesan over the top (*why not* add more cheese?) and let it set up for a few minutes. I removed the side ring from the Springform and K started sawing into it with a pizza cutter. It held up surprisingly well and didn’t fall apart like we thought it would.

It was, however, as delicious as we thought it would be. Crispy crust, incredibly ooey, gooey cheeses — the creaminess of the burrata was superb, mellow and sweet roasted tomatoes, salty prosciutto…just yum. It probably wouldn’t hold up to *actual* Chicago deep dish pizza, but I’ll take this approximation any day!

Deep Dish Pizza with Burrata, Arugula and Prosciutto