Chicago Style Hot Dog Pizza

I got a delivery a couple weeks back from Vienna Beef with everything I needed to make Chicago style hot dogs at home, but I’ve been eating a ton of hot dogs lately so I decided to make Chicago style hot dog pizza instead!

Since one of the most important aspects of a Chicago style hot dog — aside from making sure that there’s no ketchup on it of course 😂 — is that its served on a poppy seed bun so I knew that my pizza had to have a poppy seed crust.

I thought about just taking a regular pizza crust, brushing it with olive oil or water and sprinkling poppy seeds on it, but since my package of goodies from Vienna Beef already included a couple packages of poppy seed buns I decided to just use those instead.

To create the crust I took a total of eight poppy seed hot dog buns and arranged them in a large square shape with the edges slightly overlapping and then just flattened them out with a rolling pin to get them to stick together.

After that I put a bowl over them and traced around it with a knife so I was left with my circular crust. Cutting them into a circle isn’t even really necessary as a square crust would have worked just as well, but a round crust is just so much more ascetically pleasing to me.

When it came time to add sauce to the pizza I contemplated just using mustard as the base instead of pizza sauce, but I felt like that would probably be too much mustard and might just cause the taste of the mustard to overwhelm the pizza, so I just ended up using pizza sauce that I topped with shredded mozzarella cheese. After that I added sliced hot dogs.

Another internal debate I had was whether or not I should just add all the toppings to the pizza prior to baking it in the oven, but in the end I decided to just bake the crust with the sauce, cheese and sliced hot dogs on it and then add all the remaining toppings after pulling it out of the oven. When you eat a Chicago style hot dog the toppings aren’t warm when they’re added to the hot dog so I used that same reasoning with this pizza.

I baked my pizza at 350° for ten minutes, but if I ever made this pizza again I’d probably throw the poppy seed bun crust in the oven on its own first for a few minutes without any toppings on it at all just to ensure that it got a little more crispy. 

Once my pizza was out of the oven I added the sport peppers, tomatoes, pickles, white onions and sweet pickle relish, gave it a few dashes of celery salt and drizzled yellow mustard over the top of it.

I know that Chicago style hot dogs traditionally have larger dill pickle spears as well as tomato slices or wedges, but I chopped my tomatoes and pickles up a bit smaller just to spread them more evenly across the pizza and make sure that I got a little bit of everything in every single bite.

I cut my pizza into triangles, but square tavern style slices would probably work better just because the crust was pretty thin and the toppings were fairly heavy. All in all though I was pretty happy with how it turned out!