Crate Chef is a bi-monthly subscription that sends a specially curated box filled with chef-curated kitchen items, food products, as well as selected recipes. They invite a luminary from the culinary world to curate each box with their favorite finds. Each box costs $45. Crate Chef also has a build your own box option!
DEAL: Save 10% off your first order with coupon code HELLO10.
Each month, Crate Chef collaborates with a different famous chef to bring you products that will up your cooking game. This month, they collaborated with Tony Gemignani! This legend is a 13x world pizza champion!
The box is stuffed with brown squiggles to cushion everything. Some of the items were also packed with bubble wrap.
They also have a Q and A with Toni Gemignani! He answered questions about why he decided to make his own pizza flour and even how he mastered his pizza-dough throwing skills!
Everything in the TONY GEMIGNANI box!
This card tells us about the items inside the box.
They also included some recipe cards – Chef’s master dough, a Detroit Red Top pizza recipe, and Calabrese “Diavola”.
A Detroit Red Top is a square or rectangular pizza that’s a deep dish, covered in toppings, then cheese, then sauce.
Lloyd’s Detroit Style Pizza Pan (8″x10″) ($25.23) This pizza pan has a permanent Dura-Kote finish. It’s non-toxic and stick-resistant, for easy release and cleanup. Having this eliminates the hassle of pre-seasoning your pan. After cooking with it, I could really see how this is SO much better than nonstick pans designed for home use. It’s commercial quality for sure, and something I would love to get again in future boxes.
Unlike the regular pizza, Detroit style pizza is rectangular with a thick crust that is crispy and chewy, hence the shape of this pan.
Mezzaluna Pizza Cutter. They also sent this handy pizza cutter! It came with a protective cover on the sharp edge and you can reuse it when storing this piece.
I like this because it’s like the one used in restaurants and it’s easier to use and clean compared to the round pizza slicer! This mezzaluna style cutter makes it super easy and quick to cut up a pie.
Hormel Pepperoni Cup N’ Crisp. We love pepperoni so getting this in the box is an absolute delight! I love its flavor because it’s not too salty and, true to its name, it does form a small cup when cooked to a crisp. He says it traps the flavor inside – and that would be the grease!
Each pack can make quite a few small pizzas but we also like munching on them alone. This is also great to add to a cheeseboard platter for wine nights.
Tony Gemignani Hot Pepper Olive Oil ($11) If you want something spicy, this hot pepper olive oil is what you need! Just a splash of this oil will level up the flavors of the dish whether it’s pizza or pasta. Just be careful though, as it is really spicy. You can start with a small amount and work your way to more until you get your desired spicy level. It’s perfect for drizzling over a finished pie or dunking your crust.
Tony Gemignani California Artisan Flour Blend Type 00 ($4.99) Of course, this pizza themed box wouldn’t be complete without flour! This one is made with hard wheat varieties and attributed with high protein content. Aside from making pizza dough, you can also use it for focaccia bread, baguettes, and bread sticks! This is Tony’s own blend, perfect for pizza – high-gluten, high-protein. He notes that it browns well (it does!) and cooks perfectly at the high heats needed for pizza (500-550).
Tony Gemignani Low Diastatic Malt ($0.68) It’s a low diastatic malt which is the key to making a perfectly browned dough after cooking! I like that it came in a resealable pouch for easier storage. The included recipe uses this barley and wheat derived malt as a browning agent, helping the crust brown. In our finished pie, I am sure I could tell the difference using this addition, but I’ll need to do more testing.
We got everything ready to make our 3 day master dough.
After mixing up the doughball (you don’t need a mixer, we just happen to use a Kitchenaid, but the recipe does call for it), it started to rest in the fridge. Having it rise for 24 hours in the fridge introduces a lot more complexity to the flavor.
After the initial rest there’s a punching down, laying it in the pan, and another 24-48 hour rest. We decided to make a kids pizza, and you can see there’s our dough ready for action in the pan CrateChef sent.
As someone who spent his formative years in a pizza shop, tossing this pie wasn’t an issue. If hand-tossing is not something you’ve learned, don’t be afraid to just press it out in the pan.
We didn’t go for the full Red Top experience, because we wanted to show off the pepperoni to its full effect, so the cheese goes on top of the sauce in this pie. I did an initial bake of the dough, spread on the sauce (which created plenty of sizzle!), and put on the cheese!
I baked everything up using the instructions on the cards – it was helpful (and you need a pizza stone) to achieve more of a pizza oven taste to the pies, because the stone helps superheat your oven.
Beauty!
The mezzaluna cut this pie quickly and easily!
Look at that cheese!
It was filling and definitely tasty!
Perfection! I used a spatula to remove the entire deep dish pizza to a cutting board.
You can see all the flavor pooling in those little pepperoni cups!
The crust was crispy and crunchy!
The pizza cutter took care of this pie in seconds.
We decided on 6 pieces for photo purposes.
These turned out to be really big, because the dough is so pillowy.
Here’s a closer look! Yum!
It was delicious. We broke all the pizza rules and most of us used a fork and knife!
Making Detroit-style and deep dish pizza right at home is way easier because I have all these tools and ingredients from Crate Chef. They included malt and flour that Chef Tony Gemignani uses, plus a pizza pan and a pizza cutter! I want to experiment way more with this pan (and probably get a second one). The crust was amazing, and several family members voiced preference for deep dish style, which I don’t usually make. We really wanted to have a little oil in the crust (ummm sort of like 80s Pizza Hut or Uno’s if we have to be honest) so I’m going to be researching and seeing if this is something I can easily achieve. We didn’t get the chef’s cookbook in this box, but really, the include dough recipe is sufficient to start experimenting with this style of pizza. This is another well-thought-out box from CrateChef packed with high-quality items. It’s a great way to get cooking inspiration and to learn from the experts!
What did CrateChef inspire you to cook?
Comments
Oh my! That pizza looks amazing!
I finally signed up after watching this box for years! Thanks for the excellent review.
Another great cratechef box. Always filled with interesting stuff. I consider it a top box for cooking ingredients and tools. Highly recommend. Long time subscriber.
Can you please come to my house and make pizza like that because it looks way better than the Domino’s I had last night!