What Is Detroit-Style Pizza? The Square With the Caramelized Edge

My wife Allison grew up in metro Detroit. She’ll tell you — without hesitation — that Detroit-style pizza is the best pizza in America. I won’t argue. I just bake it.

It started in an auto-parts pan

The story is exactly as Detroit as it sounds. In 1946, a man named Gus Guerra was running a place called Buddy’s Rendezvous on Six Mile Road. He needed pans, his wife Anna suggested using blue steel utility trays from the local auto plants, and the pizza pan as we know it was born.

The pans were rectangular, about 10 by 14 inches, with high straight sides. They were heavy, held heat beautifully, and — critically — they let cheese melt down to the edge and caramelize against the hot steel. That caramelized cheese edge is called the frico. It’s the soul of the style.

What makes a real Detroit pie

• The pan. Blue steel, rectangular, well-seasoned. Holds heat like nothing else.
• The dough. Hydrated, airy, focaccia-adjacent. Stretched into the pan and given time to puff before baking.
• The cheese. Wisconsin brick cheese — not mozzarella. It’s higher-fat, lower-moisture, and it browns instead of stretching into long ropes.
• The crown. Cheese goes all the way to the pan edge so it melts down the side and bakes into that crunchy frico.
• The sauce. Goes on top, in stripes, after the pie comes out of the oven. Detroiters call this “racing stripes.”

Why the cheese matters more than anything

If you’ve eaten a “Detroit-style” pizza that didn’t have the dark, lacy, crackly cheese edge — it wasn’t really Detroit-style. Wisconsin brick cheese is what makes it work. Regular low-moisture mozzarella will burn instead of caramelize. We source ours from a small Wisconsin dairy and it’s the most expensive cheese in our walk-in. We don’t substitute. Ever.

How our Detroit squares come together

Our Detroit dough gets a 24-hour cold ferment, then a slow proof in the pan itself. We oil the pan generously, stretch the dough to the corners, and let it relax for another hour before topping. Brick cheese goes on first, edge-to-edge. Toppings go on the cheese. Sauce goes on after it comes out of the oven, in three crushed-tomato stripes.

The result: a pie with a crackly-crispy bottom, a deep airy chew in the middle, and that black-edged cheese crown around the rim.

Where to start

Try the Pepperoni Frico — cup-and-char pepperoni baked right into the cheese crown. The little pepperoni cups crisp up inside the frico edge and it’s basically a perfect bite. The Coney Square is our Detroit homage: coney chili, yellow mustard pop, snap-skin hot dog crumble. If you’ve ever eaten a Detroit coney dog at 2 a.m., it’ll hit different.

Allison signs off on every Detroit pie before it goes out. If she’d serve it to her family in Royal Oak, we serve it to you.