Serious Eats Foolproof Pan Pizza Recipe

A pan pizza recipe for those who love a thick and crispy crust that's golden on the bottom, but puffy and soft under the layers of sauce and mozzarella.

Kenji is the former culinary director for Serious Eats and a current culinary consultant for the site. He is also a New York Times food columnist and the author of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science.

It would arrive at the table in a jet-black, well-worn pan, its edges browned and crisped where the cheese had melted into the gap between the crust and the pan. You'd lift up a slice, and long threads of mozzarella would pull out, stretching all the way across the table, a signpost saying, Hey, everyone, it's this kid's birthday! You'd reach out your fingers—almost involuntarily—grasping at those cheese strings, plucking at them like guitar strings, wrapping them around your fingers so you could suck them off before diving into the slice itself.

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That perfect pan pizza had an open, airy, chewy crumb in the center that slowly transformed into a crisp, golden-brown, fried crust at the very bottom (from aheavy duty cast iron pan) and a soft, thin, doughy layer at the top, right at the crust-sauce interface. It was thick and robust enough to support a heavy load of toppings, though even a plain cheese or pepperoni slice would do.

in New York, aside from those crappy Pizza Hut Express joints with the prefab, lukewarm individual pizzas.) But I've spent a good deal of time working on my own pan pizza recipe, to the point that it finally lives up to the perfect image of my childhood pan pizza that still lives on in my mind.

I'm not talkingdeep-dish Chicago-style, with its crisp crust and rivers of cheese and sauce. I'm talking thick-crusted, fried-on-the-bottom, puffy, cheesy, focaccia-esque pan pizza of the kind that you might remember Pizza Hut having when you were a kid, though, in reality, most likely that pizza never really existed—as they say, pizzas past always look better through pepperoni-tinted glasses.

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If only pizza that good were also easy to make. Well, here's the good news: It is. This is the easiest pizza you will ever make. Seriously. All it takes is a few basic kitchen essentials, some simple ingredients, and a bit of patience.

This recipe avoids all three of those common pitfalls, making it pretty much foolproof. To be perfectly honest, every single one of these steps has been done before, and none of it is rocket science. All I'm doing is combining them all into a single recipe.

By now, everybody and their baker's heard aboutno-knead dough. It's a technique that was developed by Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery and popularized by Mark Bittman of the

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. The basic premise is simple: Mix together your dough ingredients in a bowl just until they're combined, cover the bowl, and let time take care of the rest. That's it.

So how does it work? Well, the goal of kneading in a traditional dough is to create gluten, a weblike network of interconnected proteins that forms when flour is mixed with water. All wheat flour contains some amount of protein (usually around 10 to 15%, depending on the variety of wheat). In their normal state, these proteins resemble tiny crumpled-up little balls of wire. With kneading, your goal is to first work these proteins until they untangle a bit, then to rub them against each other until they link up, forming a solid chain-link fence.

It's this gluten matrix that allows your dough to be stretched without breaking, and what allows it to hold nice big air bubbles inside. Ever eat a slice of pizza with a dense, under-risen crust? It's because whoever made it didn't properly form their gluten in the process.

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Now, you can see how this could take a lot of work. Kneading, aligning, folding, linking. That's why most pizza dough recipes take a good 10 to 20 minutes of elbow grease or time in a stand mixer.

See, flour naturally contains enzymes that will break down large proteins into smaller ones. Imagine them as teeny-tiny wire cutters that cut those jumbled-up balls of wire into shorter pieces. The shorter the pieces are, the easier it is to untangle them, and the easier it is to then align them and link them up into a good, strong network. No-knead dough recipes take advantage of this fact.

Over the course of an overnight sit at room temperature, those enzymes get to work breaking down proteins. Meanwhile, yeast starts to consume sugars in the flour, releasing carbon dioxide gas in the process. These bubbles of gas will cause the dough to start stretching and, in the process, will jostle and align the enzyme-primed proteins, thereby creating gluten.

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Simply allowing the dough to sit overnight will create a gluten network at least as strong as a dough that has been kneaded in astand mixeror by hand (if not stronger!), all with pretty much zero effort. Indeed, the flavor produced by letting yeast do its thing over the course of this night will also be superior to that of any same-day dough. Win-win!

Other than time, the only real key to a successful no-knead dough is high hydration. Specifically, the water content should be at least 60% of the weight of the flour you use. Luckily, high hydration also leads to superior hole structure upon baking. I go for about 65%.

One of the happy side effects of having a loose, moist dough is that it practically stretches itself. Form the dough into a ball and let it sit around at room temperature, and you'll see it spreading slowly outwards until it's nearly disk-shaped. The only thing holding it back? Friction. It sticks to the countertop or board.

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What do you use to eliminate friction? Grease. Coating the dough ball in grease and placing it on a smooth surface (such as, say, the inside of acast iron skilletor roundcake pan) allows it to stretch completely under its own power.

All that's needed is a few gentle pokes with your fingertips to do the final shaping and to eliminate any ultra-large air bubbles.

You may wonder why we'd want to get rid of those bubbles, when an open, airy structure is what we're after. Well, it's because this dough is almost

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good. It's so loose and easy to stretch that large bubbles will form giant domes, shedding their cheese and sauce, eventually collapsing into large, barren craters when you pull the pies out of the oven, like this:

Do I need to spell it out here? If your pizza is constructed in a pan, there's no need to use a peel or a stone. Just throw the pan straight into the oven.

What follows is a step-by-step guide to making a pan pizza with a crisp, olive oil-flavored crust; an open, airy, nicely chewy crumb; crispy, browned cheesy bits around the edges; and plenty of sauce and cheese. It ain't the classiest pizza on the block, but sometimes you're just looking for something cheap and easy.

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This is the hardest part of the whole process: weigh out your flour (400 grams), salt (10 grams), and yeast (4 grams) into a bowl, then add water (275 grams) and oil (8 grams) and mix it up, either with your hand or a wooden spoon. That's it. No need to knead, punch, massage, nothing. Just make sure there's no dry flour left, and you're good to go.

After all those hours of you doing absolutely nothing to it, your dough should look basically like a big, puffy, lumpy-looking bowl of soup. When you uncover the plastic and knock the bowl slightly, you'll see the whole thing deflate a bit. This is A-OK.

Sprinkle the top of the dough with some flour, then dump it out onto a floured work surface. It's fine to use a fair amount of flour here; just don't knead it into the dough. This should not be hard, as kneading isn't on your agenda anyway. Divide the dough into two even balls.

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Working with one ball of dough at a time, form and roll the dough on the counter using the sides of your hands to form a taut ball with a smooth, elastic top. Use your fingers to pinch and smooth out the bottom side of the ball of dough. Repeat this process with the second portion of dough.

Pour some olive oil into the bottom of a 10-inch cast iron skillet or a 10-inch round cake pan. If you want to bake your pizzas simultaneously, you'll need a pan or skillet for each ball of dough.

Alternatively, you can store unused dough balls in sealed containers in the refrigerator for up to three days (leave room in the container for the dough to expand) or in the freezer indefinitely. Place the dough you want to bake in the middle of the pan.

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Turn the dough over a few times until it's coated on all sides with oil, then swirl it around the pan to get oil into all the corners and the sides of the pan. Cover the whole

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