Sometimes I wonder if recipes that call for a small amount of sugar are holdovers from the 50's, when active dry yeast still needed a boost.

Have you tried a teaspoon of vinegar in your 72 hour recipe? That helps break up the complex starches, which should make sugar less necessary.

The best book on Chicago pizza is probably the Great Chicago-Style Pizza Cookbook. I believe it is available through Amazon, though I think I bought it in a gift shop at O'Hare Airport. It has a number of different dough recipes (over a dozen, I think) plus a number of sauce recipes.

The pizza dough recipe I have posted here is my variant on one from that book. (I tinkered with the ratios slightly and added semolina.)

There are a number of pizza websites, including Peter Reinhart's Pizza Quest site. I don't recall if Peter has any Chicago-style dough recipes, but as I said in another thread, I'm not convinced he really 'got' what Chicago pizza was about.

I'm a big fan of both deep dish and stuffed, but I really liked thin-crust, which was one of the five distinct styles of Chicago Pizza that Chicago Magazine identified in an article in the mid 1970's, though it seems to have largely disappeared in Chicago these days.

The five styles, and some of the places that specialized in them, at least 40 years ago, were: deep dish, stuffed, thick crust, ultra thin crust and pizza bread. Deep dish originated on the south side (Giordano's), stuffed on the west side (Nancy's), thick crust was near-north (Pizzeria Uno), thin crust was north side (My Pie, Gulliver's, Pizza Oven, Rick's) and pizza bread was common in several areas, though Gulliver's had the best at the time. (When new owners came in at Gulliver's, the story was that they changed the recipe to save on costs, and I'm told the quality suffered badly.)

When I was at Northwestern, there was a pizza place on Central (The Inferno) that made double-dough pizzas where the dough must have been 2 inches thick. I thought they were awful, but for college students on a budget they were cheap and filling.

The two best thin-crust recipes I've found were the 'Roman' dough in Peter Reinhart's book, American Pie, and this one: Thin Crust Dough Recipe. When I say 'thin crust', I mean REALLY thin, you should be able to read newsprint through the dough after it's rolled out! This requires a dough with a lot of extensibility in it, though I can't remember which of the two gluten proteins that is.

Our current favorite is the Ultra Thin Crust Pizza from KAF. However, the crust is not as thin as Mike was discussing.

http://www.kingarthurflour.com/recipes/ultra-thin-durum-semolina-pizza-crust-recipe

When I made it this time, I mixed everything together except for the olive oil, then I dribbled it in with the mixer running and ran the mixer with paddle on speed 2 for 4 minutes. It was the best crust I've ever made. The crust seemed lighter and chewier. I'll use this technique from now on.

If you're having trouble getting a thin crust pizza dough stretched out really thin, it's probably due to your flour. You need less elasticity (glutenin) and more plasticity (gliadin.) Mind you, I know of no flours available in stores that will tell you what the breakdown of gluten proteins is.

McGee says that one of the ways to add gliadin and increase the plasticity of dough is to add durum wheat, ie, semolina.

I'm not an expert on no-knead recipes, but I think the gluten develops, just not in as controlled a fashion. Bread flour tends to be high in glutenin, which contributes to elasticity. Although I didn't know it at the time I started doing it, adding semolina increases gliadin, which contributes to plasticity.

Several of the 'thin crust' recipes in the Great Chicago-Style Pizza Cookbook add semolina.

The 'hand stretch' fanatics would disown you for using a rolling pin. 🙂

The sheeters are fascinating to watch, throw in a lump of dough and out comes a perfectly round crust.