- Chicago is known for its diverse pizza styles, including deep dish, thin-crust tavern style, stuffed, and the lesser-known pizza puff, a handheld delight stuffed with mozzarella, tomato sauce, and meat, most traditionally beef sausage.
Chicago is home to quite a breadth of homegrown culinary creations. You’ve got the Great Depression-era hot dog, the fried plantain-based jibarito, and Italian beef sandwiches. Yet few Windy City food categories pack the richness of pizza. Chicago-style pizza is more than just deep dish, with the thin-crust tavern style, and stuffed variety forming the famed trifecta. Not to mention the city is home to a lesser-known spin-off, too: the pizza puff.
Emerging in the late 1960s and popularized in the 1970s, the item consists of a deep-fried flour tortilla stuffed with mozzarella, tomato sauce, and meat — most traditionally beef sausage. Folded into a square, or occasionally crimped together like a large empanada, a pizza puff is a handheld delight poised for the nighttime. While a few eateries are noted for house-made renditions, most iterations are sold at the city’s widespread hot dog stands and casual counters.
Such standardization arises because Chicago’s pizza puffs frequently come as a frozen package from Iltaco Foods, a longtime producer of the snack. Sold at an affordable price throughout the city, it’s a nostalgic staple akin to Vienna Beef, evincing Chicago’s fierce food loyalty. And while the snack is available for purchase online and can be found in select grocery stores nationwide, it remains largely a Chicago-insider secret that requires some serious dedication to track down.
Chicago’s pizza puff is a multifaceted street food icon
The pizza puff’s history delectably encapsulates Chicago’s food traditions. The dish’s origins intertwine with Iltaco, the company that initiated the item’s production in 1976. Short for Illinois Tamale Company, Assyrian immigrant Elisha Shabaz started the business in 1927. It was his grandson who came up with the concept, inspired by the blossoming pizza industry at the time…