Cast Iron Pan Pizza Recipes

Want the best homemade deep dish pizza of your life? Try this epic Cast Iron Pizza recipe! Your heavy cast iron skillet is one of the easiest ways to make epically tasty American-style pizza. The crust comes out beautifully puffed and golden, topped with gooey cheese that gets crispy towards the edges. Cast iron skillet pizza is one of the best uses for this heavy pan: in our opinion, at least! This recipe is no-fail: we’ve made it dozens of times with great results. Use our topping ideas below or any toppings you like! Let’s go.

Here’s the thing about cast iron pizza: it takes a little longer than traditional Italian-style pizza, but it’s loads easier. Here at A Couple Cooks, we’ve years honing the art of Italian-style artisan pizzaand the perfectMargherita. But this American-style cast iron skillet pizza also has a place in our kitchen: because it’s so easy to do. You’ll need to set aside 2 hours for prep, but most of the time is hands off. Here’s an overview of the process for this cast iron deep dish pizza recipe, in words and photos:

Foolproof

What’s the trick to the best cast iron deep dish pizza crust? Two proof times. If you’re an experienced baker (or watch the Great British Baking Show!), you’ll know this refers to resting the pizza dough. Proofingis when you let bread dough rest after you’ve added yeast, so that it rises.

Deep Dish Pizza Recipe

The trick to getting the extra thick crust in this recipe is proofing the dough twice. Now, this means you’ll need to wait for 45 minutes not once but

One more pro to the cast iron pan pizza method is that you don’t have to worry about shaping the dough, which is the hardest part of Italian-style pizza. Once it’s proofed twice, just press it out into the skillet and you’re ready to bake. Easy as pie! Pizza pie, that is.

One last note about the technique for a cast iron skillet pizza. Once you’ve topped your pizza, you don’t slide it into the oven. Nope, you’ll put it on a stovetop burner first and cook for 2 minutes. This quickly heats up the cast iron skillet so you don’t need to wait for that to happen during baking. So, you’ll get a blazing hot sear on the pizza from the moment it enters the oven!

Cast Iron Deep Dish Pizza Recipe

Here’s another thing to note about cast iron pizza. You can only cook one pizza at a time. Unless of course, you have two 10-inch cast iron skillets laying about. Typically one pizza might not sound like enough to feed a family. Here’s what to know:

Last thing to note about this cast iron skillet pizza. You can use our topping ideas in the recipe below OR make your own toppings! The toppings in the recipe are based on our Veggie Supreme pizza and they make your kitchen smell like a Pizza Hut. Really, we can’t speak more highly of them! But there are lots of ideas for other ways to top this pizza. Here are our favorites, in approximate order of deliciousness:

And that’s it! Let us know in the comments below how it goes, and what other questions you might have. Bon appetit!

Cast Iron Skillet Pizza With Sausage & Kale

This cast iron pizza recipe is a dream! A heavy skillet makes a fluffy deep dish pizza crust that’s perfect every time.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.

Easy

Pan Pizza Recipe

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.

Stuffed Deep Dish Pizza

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.

Chicago

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

Crispy Cheesy Pan Pizza Recipe

. 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.

Pan Pizza Recipe, Deep Dish Pan Pizza Recipe

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.

Cast

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.

Hot Sausage Cast Iron Skillet Pan Pizza Recipe

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