Cast Iron Pizza in a 19th Century Pizza Pan

hi there on our cast-iron cooking group on Facebook there seems to be a tradition for many newcomers to the group after saying hi to everyone the first thing they do is make homemade pizza in their cast-iron and why not once you've made pizza in cast iron you'll find your takeout pizza expenses will start to shrink especially when the kids take part and make their own pizzas in the kitchen here's an easy pizza recipe using the no need bread method for raising the dough you can use any large cast iron pan as a pizza pan and that's why we're using this a round griddle from the later 1800s that's anywhere from 120 to 150 years old the line on the bottom of the pan is not a crack or a weld and if you discover a pan with this mark you're practically guaranteed to own a piece of vintage American history and it also makes an astounding cast-iron pizza pan I've tried using the no need bread method with 8 to 20 hours of rising time and almost every time the yeast has spoiled and given the dough of fermented alcoholic tastes so I've had more success using the turbo method which is to add more yeast and use a shorter rising time the dough preparation is very simple we mix together the wet ingredients then we add three and a half cups of bread flour to make the dough the dough should be very wet and sticky and you may need to add a little more water to make it the right consistency all we do now is cover the bowl and let the dough rise for an hour and a half the dough is about doubled in size and it's still very wet and sticky at this point we can gently knead the dough until it's coated with flour all we need is a gentle kneading it doesn't have to be hard and firm kneading the dough is a lot of fun and here's where your kids will want to take part this gives us enough dough for two full size pizzas so we can cut this in half and shape two balls of dough all we have to do is make sure each dough ball is coated with flour we can store one ball of dough and keep it in the fridge while we use the other one to make our first pizza and now we can bring out our cast iron pizza pan coat the surface of the pan with extra-virgin olive oil and then we spread cornmeal over the surface we also add some ground pepper for extra flavor lay the dough onto the pan and begin shaping and pushing it out to cover the surface of the pan the dough will stretch back so it may take several minutes to get the dough to the size of the pan don't worry if the dough doesn't completely cover the pan because we're not done yet all we need to do is cover the pan with plastic wrap and let it sit for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour while the dough is resting we can heat the oven to as high as it will go and prepare our sauce my pizza sauce is very simple we drain crushed Tomatoes then we add some garlic powder oregano and a quarter cup of grated Parmesan cheese of course you can add your own spices and ingredients to your own pizza sauce if you want as you can see the dough has risen even more and there's no difficulty at all in shaping it to fit the whole pan this is the easy part all we have to do now is press down on the dough and shape it into a pizza and we're ready to add our toppings we simply spread the sauce out over the pizza enough to cover it and then of course we add a whole bunch of mozzarella cheese from here we pile on the pepperoni because of course there's no such thing as too much pepperoni and then we sprinkle on some more Parmesan cheese and our pizza is ready to go into the oven at this temperature it takes less than 15 minutes for it to be ready you now this is a pepperoni pizza and we let it rest in the pan for five minutes so the hot iron can finish baking the underside and then we get to slide it out and serve it because homemade pizza in a cast-iron pan is something you'll want to make again and again especially since it's likely to disappear very quickly now for the second pizza and this one is done especially for a friend one of her favorites is called carmine pizza and it uses caramelized onions on top so we spread out the dough in the pizza pan once again we add our sauce and we top it with mozzarella cheese pieces the caramelized onions and basil this is similar to a classic Italian margherita pizza but the onions certainly do add some lovely flavor to it all I can say is this pizza certainly didn't last long there's no wrong way to make pizza but when you make pizza in a cast-iron pan you'll see that other than the thousand-degree brick ovens of Italy and New York City there's simply no better way to make pizza it's easy and it's a lot of fun and of course it's delicious thank you for watching you

Channel: Cast Iron Chaos

Views: 29,069

Keywords: Cast Iron, Cooking, pizza, neapolitan, margherita, bertuccis, carmine, pepperoni, slice, pie, pizzeria, antique, baking, lunch, Griswold, Wagner, Lodge, Birmingham, griddle, 1800s, cheese, mozzarella, parmesan

Id: PQWI-mX8pz8

Length: 7min 8sec (428 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 18 2018