How to Make the Perfect Pan Pizza | Serious Eats

hey I'm Sasha today we're talking pizza something I feel super strongly about I grew up in Italy so I kind of have a lot of opinions about pizza today we're making pan pizza so that's pizza that we make in a cast-iron pan what's great about this recipe you don't need a wood-burning pizza oven you don't need a bunch of fancy equipment don't need a stand mixer all you need is a functioning oven a few bowls and two cast iron pans so before I eat all the pizza that we have right here let's get to it make some pizza all right so we're gonna start with the most important part of the whole recipe making the dough for the pizza super simple this one it's using a no need method basically just get everything into One Bowl stir it together covered in plastic wrap set it aside overnight if you're like serious about making dough spreads whatever it's good to have two types of scales I like having a large scale and then having one of these small jeweler scales you can buy these online and also in head shops is a good place to get them tell them is just for making pizza and they'll be like sure definitely for making pizza 400 grams of bread flour 4 grams this is instant yeast 10 grams of kosher salt so for this recipe everything goes in at the same time 275 grams of water yeah the sound is suggestive 8 grams of extra virgin olive oil but once you have everything measured out all that's left to do is mix it together I like to have a plastic pastry card with me for this so that as I'm going I can scrape off my wooden spoon to make sure that I'm not just stirring this one piece of sort of wet dough on my spoon and I'm actually incorporating everything that's in the bowl so you could see we're sort of got everything into like a wet shaggy dough and that's pretty much what we're looking for all you have to do is cover this bowl with plastic wrap super tight and set it aside at room temperature overnight so we have our dough that's rested overnight and we're now ready to get it out onto the counter and then just use a pastry card or scraper to get the dough out onto the works now all we have to do is sort of form it into a cohesive piece of dough and then just divide it into two pieces using a bench scraper and from there it's just balling the dough up into rounds get it into one piece and sort of tuck it under with your thighs of your hands and it'll come together and sort of naturally form an elastic smooth top as you'll see on the underside of it you've got this sort of belly button type thing and you want to minimize that and so then I just use my fingers to pinch this sort of belly button type thing together almost like you were pinching together dumplings or something and as I'm doing that also sort of flattening it out as well this will eventually be the bottom crust of your pizza and the more you have it uniform and flat the better crust you'll get on the bottom of it but we have two 10-inch cast-iron pans and we drizzle in one the two tablespoons of olive oil I'll start with the sort of presentation topside first sort of get some oil on it rub it around and then flip it over then you just have your nice and oiled up hand this is just like what I look like when I run my hand through my hair and with the flat side of my palm just sort of press down on it this is just about giving it sort of an even flat surface for it to proof evenly if you just proofed it as a ball as is you'd get like one giant domed piece of pizza all we have to do is cover both pans with plastic wrap and let them rise for two hours at room 10 so it's been two hours dough is rested in the pans and we're ready to finally bake off some pizzas the dough's have risen a little bit they're not quite to the edges of the pan but it'll just take a couple of seconds to push them out any giant air bubbles just give them a little pop and I've actually never had american-style pan pizza before but you can see a lot of similarities between this american-style pan pizza and an Italian focaccia - all the sauce and stuff or it's Apple years or focaccia Pooh years that have this sort of technique of cooking it in a cast-iron pan with tons of oil underneath the Pizza Hut you know origin stories and fan Pizza maybe started in Puglia hut like empanada pizza yeah sure pizza as we stretch them out there's a good chance there's a air pocket underneath and the dog you just want to release that all you have to do is simply lift up one edge of the dough like so and so now the best part of any pizza party is sort of having your topping set up and topping the pizzas before you bake them up but normally for pizzas you would say oh like cheetah like pasta or something you lightly dress it you're not slathering on tons of toppings this pizza is different this one you actually want to weigh it down with a lot of toppings especially when it comes to tomato sauce it needs almost that sauce to sort of soak into the dough so you need three quarters of a cup of sauce per pie and then using the back of a spoon and you're just gonna spread it all the way to the edge don't worry about having a rim I couldn't be shown it was like undressed pizza dough that's not really what we're going for here it's a lot of sauce kind of like makes me little nervous having that much sauce but it would be great a good amount of cheese go hard with it and then you know whatever you want to do let's try some of the stuff around you see what to do is basil don't try and be too perfect with it a drizzle of olive oil on top even though you've got salty cheese salty pepperoni whatever you need a final like sprinkling of salt I don't even know a terrible person not worth knowing anything no good so we're going into five hundred and fifty degree oven you know crank your oven all the way up middle rack and they go in twelve to fifteen minutes and we'll have some delicious pan pizzas ready to go [Music] [Music] oh yeah sounds pretty great in you you can see so I've got this like burnt cheesy action happening on the sort of edge of the pan so what you're going to want to do is sort of loosen up with a spatula so that you can peek at the dough underneath see how that bottom crust is come along got some pretty good color on it but it's not all the way crispy you can pop it on a burner real quick by medium heat for a couple minutes and just rotate it around to finish crisping up that bottom crust you don't have to do this but we've come this far we might as well get a super super crispy crust on the bottom and it really doesn't take that much time at all oh yeah you can see it's kind of frying getting all crispy and delicious you want to always wait a hot second before you try and cut into pizza otherwise you'll have cheese slopping off everywhere and you won't have too much left on your pie it's so final sort of finishing touch sprinkle little grated cheese on top time to slice up our pizza let's eat all right [Music] hot put it off but with up you know kind of crispy on the bottom gum sauce you got salty pepperoni and cheese there's a lot going on and a lot of dough but I dig it

Channel: Serious Eats

Views: 241,477

Keywords: Serious Eats, pizza, easy pizza, how to make a pizza, kenji lopez-alt, the food lab, daniel gritzer, sasha marx, stella parks, bravetart, pan pizza, how to make pan pizza, skillet pizza, cheese pizza, how to cook, cooking science, cooking technique, baking, pizza dough, how to make pizza dough, kitchen science

Id: 3AP4yhKS-qg

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 30 2019