I said that I’d post more pictures of the pizza when we made it again. Well, we made it for dinner tonight, so here you go!
This is the Foolproof Pan Pizza recipe by Serious Eats. If you really want to read more about it than just the recipe, you’ve got to go here (The Pizza Lab article), where the writers go into all of the reasons why this works out as well as it does. Basically, it solves the three biggest problems with making pizza:
- Problem 1: Kneading. How long is enough? What motion do I use? And is it really worth the doggone effort?
- Problem 2: Stretching. Once I’ve got that disk of dough, how do I get it into the shape of an actual pizza, ready to be topped?
- Problem 3: Transferring. Ok, let’s say I’ve got my dough made and perfectly stretched onto my pizza peel. How do I get it onto that stone in the oven without disturbing the toppings or having it turn into a misshapen blob?
(Quoting directly from that article I just linked.)
So the whole thing is super easy and AMAZINGLY delicious!
First, you saw me start the dough yesterday afternoon.
Stir it up, put it in a bowl, cover it, and walk away for 24 hours. When I came back to that bowl this afternoon, it looked like this instead.
I dumped that out onto my lightly-floured counter and split it into two tight ball of dough.
From there, we only wanted to cook one of them tonight, so one went into some of the saran wrap that had been covering the bowl (greased lightly, so hopefully it won’t stick) and set into the fridge.
The other one got put into the cast iron skillet. First, a good bit of oil went into the pan (this isn’t exactly good for you food; I never said it was healthy, I just said it was delicious!) and then the dough was spread out by hand as much as it would possibly go.
It was then covered and left to sit for a couple hours, covered in the second half of the saran wrap from yesterday, and left to rise on the kitchen counter. Two hours or so later, it hadn’t risen much, but it was much more elastic, so I was able to pull it around more, which meant I could lift it up around the edges and make sure there weren’t any big air pockets underneath it. So I squished it around with my fingers, popping big air pockets, and lifted up the edges to get the air out from underneath, and then spread it out to fill up the whole pan.
After that, we added pizza sauce.
And pepperoni . . .
And cheese (low moisture mozzarella) . . .
And more pepperoni!
And more cheese! And then fresh basil from our plant that sits in the kitchen window.
And then it goes into the oven at 550* F, which is absolutely as hot as our stove will go.
Go do something else for 13-15 minutes and come back to this!
Top it off with just a little bit of parmesan cheese (this cheese doesn’t really melt, so it doesn’t bake well), and you’re set!
It could have maybe gone for a couple minutes longer, or maybe just set on a warm burner on the stove for a bit, just to crisp up the bottom, but we’re still learning how to adjust this recipe to quite the way we want it. The great thing about doing this in the cast iron skillet is that it’s able to go from oven to stove like that. Also, Justin said it came right out of the pan, much easier than the last time when we made it in the cake pans.
So, even though it wasn’t quite as crispy on the bottom as I’d like, it was still AMAZING.
And paired with a little garlic bread and a salad with homemade buttermilk ranch dressing, it makes a fantastic dinner.
You know you want to try this now!! (Here’s that link again. Just to be helpful, you know. I’m not an enabler. Not at all!)