Beware the Deep Dish Dough

Stacy and I decided to splurge last night and order pizza before settling down in front of a movie with the kids. Having a craving for their deep dish crust and tasty toppings, we opted for carry-out from Uno's Chicago Pizzeria. We recently had a bad experience at another Uno's with the pizza dough being thoroughly uncooked. I managed to convince myself that it was OK and
continued to eat.

"Mmmmm. This pizza has really stringy dou-I mean, cheese! It's so tasty!"

We'd never really had the problem before, so it was easy to write it off as bad luck. Last night was worse. A cross section of a slice clearly showed about an eight of an inch of uncooked dough between the toppings and the crust. One bite and the underlying flavor of flour and eggs was unmistakable.

"Mmmmm. This pizza has really stringy chees-screw this, I can't do it."

Being at home, we figured it'd be easy just to fire up the oven and bake the pizza for a bit longer. HAH! After three 10-minute bakes, the dough was still noticeably raw under the toppings. I know this because I scientifically took more cross sections in my hermetically-sealed sterile lab with my sciency implements of cutting and measuring (translation: I used a pizza cutter on a slice and eye-balled the dough while standing in my kitchen.)

By then, the toppings were just past the point of overdone. It was a lost cause. We had bought two pizzas, a pepperoni for the parents and a cheese for the kids. Between trying to heat the two pizzas up, we lost an hour. It was a late dinner anyway, and our kids do not do well when they've had pizza dangled (from it's elastic dough, no less) in front of their faces, the smell wafting down the stairs like a cartoon wisp of steam tantalizing their nostrils. "I'm hungry," became a litany. They got to eat Pringles and grapes instead. Aren't we awesome parents?

Stacy left a nice long missive on Uno's website. I'm not prepared to say Uno's is teh s uck, but they're probably only going to get one more chance to impress me with their baking skills. I don't know if they used too much dough or if the toppings prevented the crust from baking properly, but that pizza was just not palatable enough to choke down. The toppings tasted good, though!