Mmm... that Salisbury style looks fantastic. I surely will try to find a way to incorporate some of that into some pizza sooner or later.
As for dough... This is my theory on dough and 'styles'... I suspect much of it was pure accident. Today , some of us go to a lot of trouble to reproduce something that we've had somewhere, we may spend a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how they do things... But, I think at some point, the owners of pizza joints were just doing the best they could with what they had. Limited cooler space, probably required some pizza places to come up with pizza dough that didn't require much cooler space.... or who knows what collection of environmental variables led to your favorite pizza maker's dough.
I know this guy who's family has been selling pizza in New Jersey for 40 years... he shared the pizza crust formula with me... it was way different then anyone had ever told me... except for one thing... the way he told it... There were no ultra fine measurements of ingredients... 50 pounds of All trumps, 3 gallons of water, cup of sugar... ( not the exact formula, but not too far off )... When I questioned some things.. he say... Oh, I'll have to ask my dad... Not that he himself wasn't knowledgeable about things, but his dad new more.. and well... from what I could gather, his dad surely had to have worked at someone else's pizza place , and probably learned from some other old guy. My point... I think stuff gets handed down, not by some ultra secret or precise method of transferring the information, but just by word of mouth and/or watching. I still suspect that for any given 'style' , it originally was just the way they did things.. I doubt that anyone ever sat down and spent hours and hours tweaking the formula to get it just right... that probably evolved to the point where it worked, and then didn't stop doing it that way , once it worked well for them.
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Topic: What is Detroit Style Pizza? (Read 6876 times)