Pizza grilled on oven grates — crispy bottom without a stone or steel

here's a method for baking a great pizza in a normal home oven without the use of a pizza stone or pizza steel you normally need a big heavy slab of thermally conductive material to brown the bottom of your pizza without a stone it just ends up tasting like bread with stuff on top but with the method I'm going to show you now we shall achieve a brown crispy bottom by simply cooking the pizza up on the oven grate itself this takes some practice and the result tastes a little different from a traditional pie but it is very tasty and it is very quick no need to preheat the oven on max for an hour to get your stone or steel hot enough you just turn on your broiler all the way hot Brits would call this a grill it's the filament at the top of your oven make sure that your oven grate is reasonably clean and is positioned up high second from the top position is what works for me broilers heat up in a matter of seconds but you do need to give this a few minutes to heat up the grate itself a good way to test is just to put a wet towel on the grate if it sizzles it's hot enough and it'll probably come up to temperature in the time it takes to get your dough prepped I'm using my usual pizza dough recipe which is in the description I mix up my dough portion it into balls and then put them straight in the refrigerator for a cold rise at least a day and up to a week in there I'm working with my dough straight out of the refrigerator it really helps if the dough is as cold as possible when it goes in the oven a little flour on both sides and rather than stretch this by hand I'm going to use a rolling pin this baking method works much better if the dough is rolled out to an even thickness throughout if you don't have a rolling pin a wine bottle works great I'm rolling and turning rolling and turning just like I would if I was rolling out pastry it ensures the dough won't stick to the board and it helps you push it out evenly in all directions though I am shooting for an oblong rather than a circle a rectangular shape will be much easier to get into the oven and under the broiler you'll see roll it out until it's not quite as thin as you want it because it'll stretch a little more on the way in now I'm just gonna coat it in a very thin film of olive oil and I'm working quickly before this dough warms up too much while it's cold it's stiff and while it's stiff it's easier to drape onto the oven great I'll pull the grayed out as far as it goes and here comes the hard part draping the dough onto the great oil side down that's important oil side down if you have big areas of dough around the edge that are falling really far down try to pick them up and stretch them until you can hang them over the nearest great remember the grates are hot even this is the name of the game here we want every inch of dough as equal a distance as possible from the broiler and I do find that I get more even cooking if I slide this in and then close the oven door some people like to leave the door open when broiling I get more even results with this if I close it then watch it like a hawk this first part only takes me about three minutes I'm looking for the dough to start to burn yes I'm waiting for a little burning a few little burned spots are standard on a traditional pizza crust it's called leopard spotting okay now freeze-frame you can see that my broiler is hotter toward the back of the oven that far side is browner than the nearside if yours is really uneven you could try rotating the dough but it has to cook to a certain point before it'll release from the grates intact so I'm simply going to rotate as I flip over and around since we old the downward facing side and we preheated the oven grate a little bit that releases very easily I'm just using my fingers but you could use tongs now I'm just gonna dress the pizza right here it tastes better if it cooks quickly and taking this out to the counter top to dress it would really slow us down my sauce by the way is just Pass teen kitchen ready ground Tomatoes when I have to settle for another crushed tomato product I usually need to put in tomato paste to get the flavor as strong as I want it some olive oil a little sugar and some dried herbs oregano maybe some basil that's it remember it's a super thin pizza so be careful you don't put on too much sauce I usually need to put on a little less than is my instinct a little finely grated parmesan on top of the sauce really improves the flavor and then my graded mozzarella I'm using Boar's Head whole milk low-moisture mozzarella freshly grated the pre graded stuff has anti-caking agents that interfere with browning now this is a style of pizza where you absolutely could use fresh mozzarella if you wanted the high moisture stuff that they use on Neapolitan pizza just don't put on quite as much or the pizza will be soggy ok back under the broiler this goes and again I get a more even result if I close the door watch it like a hawk two minutes later the back row of bubbles looks like it's going to burn because my broiler is apparently a lot hotter back there I'm gonna rotate the pizza which is easy to do now that the crust has solidified back in and then just cook it until the cheese is as Brown as you'd like I gave it maybe another minute and out it comes straight to a cooling rack to keep the crust crispy but you could pull it out onto anything total cook time there was like seven minutes and since the sauce and cheese were only on there for half that time you'll notice some differences compared to a normal pizza this sauce has a brighter color and flavor and the cheese is hardly broken at all with a conventionally baked pizza the cheese is in there for long enough to overheat and squeeze out a bunch of orange grease there's hardly any grease here which is great in my opinion after its cooled and steamed off for a few minutes I'll transfer it to a cutting board and chop through it really crispy crust there and of course we know exactly how Brown the bottom is amazing and the taste amazingly close to a New York style pizza though is a little different because the topside crust got some dry heat in the oven it has not bonded with the sauce and cheese quite as much the layers are a bit more distinct in the mouth and the bottom crust is kind of smooth on the tongue none of this is bad minds you it's just a little different another terrific thing about this method is that we could immediately turn around and start baking another pizza right after the first one comes out the grates don't need a lot of time to recharge with heat the way a pizza stone does now you are no doubt wondering why don't you just bake it on a cookie sheet why not on the cooling rack why didn't you hand stretch the dough why does it have to be even thickness well I'm gonna show you all of those things right after I thank the sponsor of this video world of warships I've reached that season in a man's life when he inexplicably becomes 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get back to your questions why does the dough have to be rolled out to even thickness why can't you just hand stretch it well let's try that a little flour on the board I'll punch it out a little and then you could toss it in the air or just do a gravity stretch like this one virtue of this kind of stretching is that it gets you uneven thickness gossamer thin dough toward the center and a nice fluffy cornice around the edge that's normally a good thing heterogeneity drape that on the hot grates everything is looking good so far but then notice how much further along those gossamer thin areas are they're burning and the thicker areas are still white that is not gonna cut it this baking method works a lot better if you roll the dough out to a uniform thickness to avoid a disaster like that here's another good question why bother laying the dough perilously across the oven grates in the first place why not just do it on a baking sheet well you could get your dough rolled out rub on a thin film of oil and then place an oil side down on a baking sheet the oil is essential without it the dough would stick under the hot broiler it goes and check this out it cooks so much slower it was eight minutes before I got that much color on the first side and that's not even that great color since it's been in there for so long it is now dry and hard well top it put it back under the broiler this is certainly a lot easier cheese takes the normal three or so minutes to brown though geez I should have rotated that you don't realize how uneven your broiler is until you try to do something like this let it cool slice it up and honestly that's not bad if I was hungry I'd eat that happily but it tastes like one of those pizzas you make with a pre-baked crust from the grocery store because that's essentially what it is the crust is way over baked it's almost like pizza toppings on a hot cracker it's good food but bad pizza in my opinion when we bake right on the hot oven grates were literally grilling the pizza just like we would on a charcoal grill outside it's getting a radiant heat from above and a little radiation or convection from below plus it's getting conductive heat from the hot grate that means it cooks quicker and loses less moisture before turning brown and unlike a pizza we grill outside this pizza were able to hit with very intense heat from above to get great color on the cheese which is always the problem with grilled pizza you never get enough color on the cheese now you would logically wonder can't we get the best of both worlds by baking this on the cooling rack again we're not perilously draping dough over hot wide-set grates oiled side goes right down on the rack and you can easily slide that rack right onto the grate or kind of easily now the dough is getting heat on both sides which is good but it's still not actually touching the hot grates which means it still cooks kind of slowly it took almost five minutes to get this much color and that's not that much color as I flip it I can feel that's going kind of hard and crackery again top it off normal three minutes under the broiler again and that doesn't look bad let it cool a bit transfer it to a cutting board slicer up and that's definitely better than the pizza we baked on the cookie sheet but it's not as good as the one we did on the oven great so the crust again is just too much like a cracker it is not merged hardly at all with the toppings now you might be wondering couldn't you fix this problem by preheating the cooling rack under the broiler yes I think that would work the problem is that cooling racks ironically are often not designed to get very hot they have coatings on them that can break down and melt the manufacturer should tell you what maximum heat your rack is designed to tolerate I think this one is like 500 Fahrenheit or to 60 C and sir offices will get considerably hotter than that when they're right under a broiler at full strength even if you got a cooling rack that could take the heat I suspect it still wouldn't work quite as well because the metal will be thinner which means it'll retain and then transfer less heat that you'll get from those thicker oven grates anyway I'm sure there's lots of different ways to make this basic method work experiment with your own tools and let me know what works for you just remember that every oven is different I learned from doing this that my new oven here has a broiler hot spot on the back end to the right your oven will have its own eccentricities I recommend making a batch of four or eight dough balls and just practicing this in your oven a few times over and over and over again before you actually try to make dinner for hungry people but once you get the hang of it in your oven I think this is a pretty easy and energy efficient method that gets great results and requires no special equipment you can't beat that

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 1,762,299

Rating: 4.8900599 out of 5

Keywords: homemade pizza, pizza stone, pizza recipe, pizza steel, baking stone, how to cook pizza, easy pizza recipe, baking steel, pizza recipe in oven, pizza stone vs steel, homemade pizza dough, homemade pizza recipe, homemade pizza sauce, baking stone alternative, how to make pizza from scratch, grilled pizza, oven grates, broiled pizza, pizza under broiler

Id: npbj6Z-JL8U

Length: 11min 25sec (685 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/This_is_Vokra]

Adam must love pizza lmao. This is his 5th pizza video, 8th if you count that pizza bread and both the monday vids on pizza 😅

[u/Hayden9001]

Looks cool, but I’d burn my hand off doing this lol

[u/iDisc]

Insert angry people at Adam's sponsor.

[u/Seethi110]

I don't understand why he left the pizza stone/steel in there if he was trying to show you a way to cook without it. Having that in there can absorb and conduct heat and would affect the results, no?

[u/MartyBoshySmith]

Vibing crust

[u/nothingxs]

This is an aggressively dangerous and bad way to do this. Why?

[u/Sputnik42]

Did anyone without stone or steel try to start baking dough with sauce first and than add cheese later? Are results any good?

[u/jacobhasvtsax]

I honestly might try this with one of those pillsbury pizza doughs. Never got into making dough from scratch

[u/TheLuminary]

So when do we get an Adam vs Alex pizza in the kitchen oven video?