I recently made a deep dish pizza crust that called for melting the shortening in 1 cup water with sugar and salt and then cooling until tepid.  The yeast was added to 1/2 cup warm water - which was then added to the “shortening water”. 

Does anyone have an idea why the shortening needed to be melted first?  Could I have used a liquid oil instead-since many of the recipes call for liquid oil with a 20% olive oil?  Any idea what difference it would have made to either use the liquid oils or to have blended in the the solid shortening with the other ingredients?

We are in search of a **DEEP DISH** pizza crust that is crisp, tender and crumbly (some say it has corn meal-others say it doesn’t). like those in our “old” home town of Chicago at Gino’s East - since we can’t get them here in South Carolina!

Any ideas or help?

When you use solid fats, the resulting dough is flakier and when you use liquid fat, it is more tender than flaky.  If you melt the crisco, therefore, the crust will be more tender than if you used it in solid form—you would probably get similar results using another oil in liquid form.