Detroit Style Pizza at Home: Pan, Dough, and Cheese Technique

Detroit-style pizza is a square pan pizza with a thick, airy, crisp-bottomed crust and a rim of cheese that caramelizes against the hot metal. Modernist Pizza names that frico edge, the square shape and the thick, crispy crust as the marks of the style, along with sauce spooned on top rather than underneath.

It’s one of the easier styles to get right in a kitchen oven. There’s no stretching or launching: you press the dough into the pan, top it there and bake it there.

Where it came from

Most accounts start at Buddy’s Rendezvous, a Detroit bar owned by Gus Guerra. According to Modernist Pizza, Guerra’s mother-in-law gave him her recipe for a pan-baked pizza, and different sources date the result to anywhere between 1942 and 1946. Guerra’s twists were to bake it in rectangular blue steel pans made to hold small parts for the local auto factories, and to take the cheese right to the edges so it dropped down between the dough and the pan and caramelized there.

Guerra sold Buddy’s in 1953 and opened another pizzeria, the Cloverleaf, several miles away. The pans became so tied to the style that when Dover Parkersburg, the West Virginia factory that made them, closed in 2011, Modernist Pizza describes a crisis among Detroit pizzerias until another company began making them in 2012. The style spread nationally in the 2010s; Pizza Hut launched a Detroit-style pizza across the country in 2020.

The pan

A Detroit pan is deep and rectangular. LloydPans, a maker of Detroit pans, gives two traditional sizes, 8 × 10 and 10 × 14 inches (checked October 14, 2026). This recipe uses 10 × 14, the Planner’s Detroit default. The original pans at Buddy’s were blue steel; the Detroit-style pan King Arthur Baking describes is dark anodized. The pan’s walls are where the cheese builds up and browns into the crisp edge.

You don’t need a specialty pan to start. King Arthur Baking’s recipe is written for a Detroit-style pan or an ordinary 9 × 13-inch metal pan, and the dough and topping amounts below cover both. Whatever you use, it should be metal and rated for a 500°F oven; check the maker’s maximum temperature for any nonstick coating.

The dough

The method here is King Arthur Baking’s Weeknight Detroit Pizza, a same-day dough at 75% hydration with a little olive oil in it. It’s also the method the Pizza Planner uses for Detroit-style pizza. King Arthur’s quantities fit a 9 × 13-inch pan; for a 10 × 14-inch pan, the second column scales every ingredient by the pan’s area (140 square inches against 117, a factor of about 1.2). The scaling is calculated, and it matches the Planner’s 786 g of dough for that pan.

Plus about 1 tablespoon of olive oil for the pan (12 g for the smaller pan, 14 g for the larger).

A few notes on the formula:

• Hydration. 75% makes a sticky dough that’s easiest to handle with wet hands and a few folds in the bowl rather than kneading. Modernist Pizza tested its own Detroit-style dough a little wetter and a little drier than its master recipe and found the pizzas comparable to the original. That’s a result for the book’s formula, not a promise for every flour or recipe.
• Oil. King Arthur puts a tablespoon of oil in the dough. Modernist Pizza’s Detroit dough has none, since oil from the pan and from the melting cheese gets into the crust anyway, and the authors found that adding 5% oil or butter made a very good alternative. Either works.
• Flour. Bread flour gives the dough enough strength to hold its open, bready crumb.

Cheese and sauce

Cheese. Wisconsin brick cheese is the traditional choice. It’s a semi-soft cheese first made in Wisconsin in 1877, firmer and milder than the limburger it was developed from, and it can be hard to find outside the Midwest. King Arthur shreds it; J. Kenji López-Alt’s Detroit-style recipe for Serious Eats cuts it into ½-inch cubes. King Arthur’s substitute is equal parts whole-milk low-moisture mozzarella and cheddar. Whichever you use, it goes right to the walls: a thick ring where the dough meets the pan, so it melts down the sides and browns against the metal. The Pizza Calculator’s starting range of cheese for one 10 × 14-inch pan is 361 to 434 g, and King Arthur’s 340 g for the smaller pan scales to about 400 g.

Sauce. Detroit-style sauce is cooked and thick, so it sits on the cheese in stripes instead of soaking in. King Arthur’s simmers a 28-ounce can of crushed tomatoes with olive oil, garlic, a little sugar and salt until it has reduced to about 3 cups, enough for about two pizzas. If you use a jarred sauce, reduce it until it holds its shape on a spoon.

When the sauce goes on. Pizzerias do it both ways. Modernist Pizza notes that Detroit pizzerias spoon the sauce on top of the cheese either before or after baking, and points out that saucing after baking keeps the crust from turning gummy. King Arthur’s method, used here, adds thick sauce for the second stage of the bake, once the crust has already set for 10 to 12 minutes. If you’d rather sauce it after, warm the sauce and stripe it on as the pizza comes out of the pan.

Make it

Time: about 40 minutes of active work and 22 to 26 minutes in the oven; about 4 hours from mixing to eating, on the same day.

Ingredients for one 10 × 14-inch pizza

• Dough: 431 g bread flour, 323 g lukewarm water (85–90°F), 11 g table salt, 3.6 g instant yeast, 18 g extra-virgin olive oil
• 14 g olive oil, for the pan
• About 400 g brick cheese, shredded or cut into ½-inch cubes (or 200 g whole-milk low-moisture mozzarella and 200 g cheddar)
• About 360 g thick cooked tomato sauce (recipe below)
• About 70 g pepperoni (optional)
• About 30 g Pecorino Romano, finely grated

Sauce (about 3 cups, enough for two pizzas): 25 g extra-virgin olive oil, 4 garlic cloves, finely chopped, one 28-ounce (794 g) can crushed tomatoes, 17 g sugar, and 1 teaspoon table salt, plus more to taste.

Topping amounts are King Arthur’s, scaled to the larger pan and rounded.

Method

1. Mix. Whisk the flour, salt and yeast together in a large bowl. Add the water and oil and stir until no dry patches remain. If the dough feels dry, add up to a tablespoon more water.
2. Fold. Cover and rest 15 minutes. With a wet hand, lift one side of the dough, stretch it up and press it into the middle, then turn the bowl a quarter turn. Repeat 3 to 6 times, until the dough resists. Rest 15 minutes more and repeat the folds once. The dough should feel smoother and tighter.
3. First rise. Cover and leave at room temperature for 1 to 1½ hours, until slightly puffy. It doesn’t need to double. (King Arthur also allows refrigerating the covered dough for 8 to 24 hours after the second fold; give it an hour at room temperature before it goes into the pan.)
4. Sauce. While the dough rises, warm the oil, cook the garlic about 30 seconds, add the tomatoes, sugar and salt, and simmer about 20 minutes, until reduced to about 3 cups. Salt to taste and let it cool.
5. Preheat. Put a baking steel or stone on a rack in the lower third of the oven, or use the bare rack, and heat the oven to 500°F (260°C). The Planner allows 25 to 35 minutes for the oven alone and 45 to 60 minutes with a steel or stone inside.
6. Pan the dough. Oil the pan, add the dough and turn it once to coat. Press and dimple it toward the corners. If it springs back, cover it, rest 30 minutes and press again.
7. Final rise. Cover and let the dough rise in the pan for 45 to 60 minutes, until puffy and bubbly but not doubled.
8. First bake. Bake the untopped dough for 10 to 12 minutes, until it is set but barely colored.
9. Cheese and sauce. Pile a thick ring of cheese where the dough meets the pan walls and spread the rest over the middle. Spoon about 360 g of sauce over the cheese in thick stripes, and add the pepperoni if using.
10. Finish. Bake 12 to 14 minutes more, until the edges are deeply browned and crisp.
11. Release. Loosen the edges with a thin spatula or dull knife and slide the pizza straight onto a wire rack, so the bottom doesn’t steam in the pan. After a few minutes, sprinkle with the Pecorino Romano and cut into squares.

Knowing when it’s done

• The edge: the cheese against the walls is dark brown and crisp, and the crust has pulled slightly away from the pan.
• The base: lift a corner with a thin spatula. It should be golden-brown and crisp, not pale.
• The top: the cheese is fully melted and bubbling, with the sauce stripes thickened.

When it goes wrong

For anything else, the Pizza Doctor works from what you see on the finished pizza.

Why it suits a home oven

Detroit-style pizza is thick and bread-like, so it needs a longer, moderate bake rather than a minute of fierce heat. Modernist Pizza notes that most Detroit pizzerias bake it in ordinary gas ovens rather than pizza ovens for that reason, and a kitchen oven at 500°F does the same job. The flip side: the Planner doesn’t offer a Detroit bake for a portable pizza oven, because a fast high-heat hearth bake would brown the outside long before the middle of a thick pan pizza cooks through.

If you like this, the Sicilian and grandma pan pizzas use similar pan techniques with a different dough and bake, and Chicago deep dish is a taller pan pizza again.

Sources

• King Arthur Baking, Weeknight Detroit Pizza: dough formula, pan, sauce, cheese and its substitute, folds and rise times, the two-stage 500°F bake and the release. Checked October 14, 2026.
• Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, Modernist Pizza (2021), volume 1: page 65 (Gus Guerra, Buddy’s Rendezvous, the auto-parts pans, Dover Parkersburg, sauce before or after baking), page 142 (the style, sauce after baking, national spread), page 250 (brick cheese, the frico edge, gas ovens), page 289 (Detroit dough hydration tests), pages 316 and 318 (fat in Detroit dough) and pages 370–371 (the gel layer).
• J. Kenji López-Alt, Serious Eats, Detroit-Style Pizza: brick cheese cut into ½-inch cubes. Checked October 14, 2026.
• LloydPans, Detroit-Style Pizza Pans: the traditional 8 × 10- and 10 × 14-inch sizes. Checked October 14, 2026.
• Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin, Widmer’s Brick Cheese: the origin and character of brick cheese. Checked October 14, 2026.
• Pan areas, scaled ingredient weights and the Pizza Calculator ranges are calculated with the site’s pizza engine.