My Weekly Pizza: The Chicago Style Stuffed Pizza

I am an avid Hunger Games fan. Now, admittedly, I didn’t go see it at the very first midnight showing, but that’s only because it’s not easy to find a babysitter in the middle of the night. But had I been able to find a respectable teenager who wasn’t already at the movie, or whose parents would have willingly let them stay out until 3 a.m. on a school night, you can bet I would have been there. I’ve read the all of the books at least twice (or 3-4 times if that’s not too crazy sounding) and had been looking forward to this movie for a long while now. I figured we could make a date-day out of it since the hubs and I don’t often get out by ourselves.

So we called our good friends to hit up an afternoon showing. Honestly, we haven’t been to a movie since before Christmas. It was all I could do to not gorge myself on fabulous buttery popcorn while being completely sucked in by the movie. Why did I have to go easy on my giant and delicious popcorn bucket? Because this week the hubs let me pick the pizza, and I knew I was going to dig into a family size Chicago Style Stuffed pizza right afterwards. Appropriately ironic after watching a movie called The Hunger Games, right?

Building the Beast

It may look normal, but you'll know you've got a stuffed
pizza as soon as you attempt to lift it; this pie is a monster!

A little - okay, a BIG! - preview of what lies ahead

So after watching the movie, I went and grabbed Thing 1 & Thing 2 from the sitter’s and met back up with the hubs and friends. I was starving by the time I got back to their house, but fortunately they had already gotten things going and cheesy bread was coming fresh out of the oven as we walked in the door. We whet our appetites with it while we discussed the movie in detail, patiently waiting for the main course to cook.

At 0730 hours, the cheesy bread became sentient ... and delicious.

I have to admit, I was a little overly excited for this pizza. We had a plan. As much as I was looking forward to eating it, I was also looking forward to decorating it. The stuffed pizzas are a marvel in their own right, but this one was destined for even more greatness. A victor. An 11. A pizza worthy of being a true Hunger Games tribute (see what I did there?).

We had been discussing varying ways to do this for a few days, and possibly went a little overboard. Should we try to spoon pizza sauce in a pattern? Lay out pepperonis cut in various shapes? Hike out to the middle of the woods and carve it up with swords and spears? Finally we decided on a plan. We would make a stencil from another pizza tray, then use my mini kitchen torch to brown around the stencil and quite literally burn the logo onto the pizza. Sounds amazing, and not at all dorky right? Awesome.

We stopped by the South Rutherford Blvd. Papa Murphy's to see if we could pick up some spare trays, and the only-somewhat-puzzled employees there happily obliged and wished us luck.

Behold, the preparations!

Paper guide is cut out and ready to draw on the cooking plate

Outline tracing is done!

The two stencils that resulted - one for outlining, and a second
to try filling with color. The original plan was to do the outline on
the cheesy bread's backside, and the filled version on the pizza.

Our thinking was that the pizza trays are obviously designed to withstand a nominal amount of heat for an extended period of time. Hopefully those traits would shield parts of the pizza from heat while we used a mini torch to brown the exposed areas and literally cook a Mockingjay pin outline into back side of the crust. We tested the trays with a lit match held under them and they only slightly turned brown when exposed to the open flame. We were ready to rock n' roll.

When the pizza finally came out of the oven, we were nearly giddy with anticipation. The hubs looked excited to be wielding anything with an open flame. The men got the pizza prepared, laid the stencil, and lit that torch up ready to go!

The moment the flame hit the pizza and stencil, hubs realized his creation wasn't going to pan out quite like he planned. Don't get me wrong; there was definitely a very visible correlation between our pizza and the Hunger Games. It was just that our efforts had a lot more in common with Book 2 ... catching fire. Our excitement immediately fizzled as the stencil started to burn without the pizza so much as blushing. Turns out there's a big difference between the heat from a lit match and the business end of a 3400°F propane torch. Oh well. I guess that’s what happens when you get a little too carried away in the kitchen.

A very singed Mockingjay

The good news is we still had a fabulous pizza to dig into. This truly was one of the best pizzas I have ever eaten from Papa Murphy’s. It was massive, flavorful, completely balanced ... my mouth is watering just thinking about it. I’m a meat eating kind of girl, so the combination of sausage, salami, ground beef, and pepperoni really hit the spot. And of course my second favorite part of a pizza is the crust (avid bread/carbs fan here, as well), and with the stuffed pizza you get plenty of crust. We did have them go a little light on the onions, mostly because the onion there are so fresh and have a strong flavor. They had a slight crunch, and mixed in with all the cheese and meats, they really added another level of flavor to make this pizza even more delicious. So delicious, in fact, that it may have to make another appearance or two on this blog. And then I will have to think of more favorable adjectives I can use to describe pizza. Stupendous! Delectable! Mouthwatering! Nectarous! Well, maybe not nectarous (fail thesaurus.com).