Chicago Day 1

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[youtube=WQGNZx5PcsQ][youtube=gkpyx1wTVYs][youtube=ce-8oYzxdjc]

This is Day 1 of my Chicago trip. OK, it's technically west of Chicago about 45 mintues (Rolling Meadows and Schaumburg) but I'm going in with the full Chicago spirit.....
The minute I started driving down the freeway, the minute I realized, gosh, this is not California anymore.... it's so green everywhere, the cute suburbs that we see in movies with the prairie style houses. No Spanish street names. The clerk at the store actually said Hi to me and chatted a little. Of course all these charming characters comes with a price..... especially when I walked into Lou Malnati's Pizzeria, asking for a table for one. The waitress swings by, "Are you still waiting? Do you want to order something ahead?" I smiled and told her to get me an individual sized Lou Malnati Classic. It's a very basic pizza, deep dish, layers of cheese on the bottom, covered with a thin Italian sausage patty (so that you get a bite of sausage in every corner) and covered in pizza sauce. Nothing else. It takes a confident chef to prepare something like this, you can't hide behind garlic or extra cheese, spices or gimmicks. The crust, baked to perfection. Bottom of the crust soaked up most of the grease, with a little left for the side edges to be just cripsy enough but not greasy. A little resemblence to my favorite Japanese style dumpling -- Gyoza when it is cooked perfectly, a little burnt crispy oil-with-dough featherness on the side makes it extra heavenly. Not a thick crust like some other pizzas that I've had. I've had Giordanos as well as Uno, where I belive Giordano was more of a pie-dough like crust and Lou is more the traditional deep dish crust. If you take a closer look at the video when I cut open the pizza, a nice gooey fluid of cheese oil gushes out as soon as the pizza pie is cut open, but soon dissapears due to the temperature drop, they solidifies and submerge back in the pizza. It's a beautiful sight. The tast is as bit as good as it looks and smells. But mind you, do not underestimate the 6 inch individual size, I am so full......

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