Detroit-Style Pizza: The Frico Edge

Detroit-style pizza is proof that a pizza’s defining feature can come from the pan it’s baked in, not the dough or the toppings. It has also become one of the fastest-growing pizza styles outside its home city in recent years, as pizzerias nationwide have adopted the pan and the technique that made it famous.

Origins: Auto-Plant Pans

Detroit pizza’s origin story is inseparable from the city’s manufacturing history. The style is credited to Buddy’s Rendezvous, which began baking pizza in 1946 using blue steel pans originally manufactured for holding small industrial parts in Detroit’s automotive plants. Those rectangular pans were deep, heavy-gauge, and had seasoned beautifully after repeated use — qualities that turned out to be ideal for baking bread. The pans conduct and retain heat aggressively, and their straight sides give Detroit pizza its signature rectangular shape, distinct from the round pies of nearly every other American style. Buddy’s kept the original pans in rotation for years, and the style spread slowly through Detroit before other local pizzerias began sourcing similar blue steel pans — often still repurposed rather than manufactured specifically for baking — to replicate the effect.

The Frico Cheese Edge

The single most recognizable feature of Detroit pizza is its edge: cheese pushed all the way to the pan’s sides during assembly melts, caramelizes, and fries against the hot steel, forming a lacy, crisp, deeply browned rim often called the “frico” — a nod to the crisp cheese wafers of the same name. That caramelized cheese ring is not incidental; it’s the single most sought-after bite on the pizza, and it’s a direct result of the pan itself. A pizza baked in a standard round pan or on a stone can’t replicate it, because the effect depends on cheese making direct, sustained contact with hot, oiled steel along a defined edge. Getting a clean frico edge at home requires pushing cheese firmly against the pan walls before baking and using enough oil in the pan that the cheese can actually fry rather than simply melt in place.

Brick Cheese

Traditional Detroit pizza uses brick cheese, a semi-soft cow’s-milk cheese native to Wisconsin with a mild, slightly tangy flavor and excellent melting properties. Brick cheese is less common outside the Midwest, so many pizzerias and home cooks substitute a blend of low-moisture mozzarella and a small amount of sharper cheese like white cheddar to approximate its flavor and melt characteristics. What matters functionally is that the cheese needs enough fat content to render properly against the pan and form that crisp edge, while still melting into a cohesive, stretchy layer across the rest of the pie. Some bakers layer two cheeses deliberately — a milder, higher-fat cheese for the edge and a firmer, more flavorful one for the interior — to get both the crisp frico and a well-melted center in the same bake.

The crust and cheese aren’t separate elements on a Detroit pizza — the edge exists because they’re forced to compete for the same square inch of hot steel.

Airy Crumb

Beneath the cheese, Detroit dough is a high-hydration, focaccia-adjacent dough that’s pressed (not stretched or rolled) into the oiled pan and given a substantial second rise directly in the pan before baking. That long proof in a well-oiled, high-sided pan produces a distinctly airy, open crumb structure with large, irregular holes — closer to good focaccia than to the dense, cracker-like base of thin-crust styles. The bottom crust fries in the oil pooled in the pan, giving a crisp, almost fried bottom that contrasts with the soft, pillowy interior. Detroit pizza is also topped in reverse order relative to most styles: cheese and toppings go down first, with sauce typically applied in stripes on top after baking, similar in spirit to Chicago’s inverted layering but executed with thinner, more restrained sauce lines rather than a full top layer. That sauce-on-top finish also keeps the sauce visually distinct rather than baked into the cheese, so each stripe stays bright and slightly cooked rather than fully melted in.

Detroit vs Sicilian

Detroit pizza is frequently compared to Sicilian pizza because both are rectangular, pan-baked, and thicker than a typical round pizza — but the similarities are mostly superficial. Sicilian pizza generally uses a shallower pan, a thicker overall crust-to-topping ratio, and sauce applied on top in the conventional order, often finished with breadcrumbs or a lighter cheese application rather than cheese pushed to the pan’s edges. Detroit’s defining frico edge simply doesn’t exist on a traditional Sicilian pie, because Sicilian dough isn’t pressed into the corners the same way and its pans lack the same seasoned, heat-retentive quality as Detroit’s industrial steel. The crumb structures also differ: Sicilian crust tends to be denser and more bread-like throughout, while Detroit’s focaccia-style proof produces a lighter, more irregular hole structure. The two styles also diverge in scale: Sicilian pans are typically sized for a full sheet meant to feed a group, while Detroit pans were designed around a smaller, standardized industrial-parts tray, which is why authentic Detroit pizza is usually served in a more compact rectangle than a full Sicilian sheet pan pie. Home cooks without an authentic blue steel pan can get close results with a well-seasoned cast-iron or carbon-steel rectangular pan, provided it’s oiled generously enough to reproduce the fried edge that defines the style.

Detroit’s inverted assembly puts it in direct conversation with Chicago deep-dish, and the cheese choice that makes or breaks the frico edge is covered in more depth in our guide to mozzarella and other melting cheeses.