The Best Pan Pizza Recipe

If you love pizza, you're in luck. This pan pizza recipe will give you a super versatile dough that you can make into a fantastically pillowy cast-iron skillet pie, or stretch out by hand into a classic New York style slice to bake on a sheet tray. For those no-frills days when you're not in the mood for sauce and cheese, you can treat this dough just like you would a traditional focaccia and bake it plain with lots of oil, flakey sea salt, herbs or whatever else you want to throw on top for a jazzed-up piece of crunchy-soft bread.

There are three things that make this pizza dough unlike any other you've made before: a tangzhong paste, a little bit of whole wheat flour, and a very long resting time. The tangzhong method incorporates a water roux into the dough to maximize the tender, moist qualities found in your favorite breads. Often used in Japanese-style milk bread, you can make tangzhong by briefly cooking water and flour together over a medium-low heat until a paste forms. This process gelatinizes the starch content in the flour and helps trap moisture inside the dough, giving you a bite of pizza that is pillowy, fluffy, and soft with a little chew on the inside. 

Accounting for about 10% of the total flour weight, the whole wheat flour plays two roles: providing a more hearty flavor to the dough, and giving the moisture-rich dough more structure. While you can use entirely all-purpose or bread flour—just substitute in 1/3 cup of white flour instead of 1/4 cup whole wheat—the higher bran and germ content in whole wheat gives our dough a slight nuttiness and depth of flavor. Because whole wheat flour tends to absorb more moisture than all-purpose or bread flour, its addition also makes our relatively high-hydration dough (ringing in at about 81% hydration!) a little bit easier to handle during the stretch and fold process. 

Foolproof Pan Pizza Recipe

More often than not,  more time = more flavor in cooking, and this dough is no exception. This dough takes at least one full day to develop into its best self, but your patience will be rewarded! Thankfully, it is a time-intensive but not labor-intensive dough, requiring less than 5 minutes of kneading. We begin with a brief autolyse stage in which we allow the dough to rest on its own without putting in too much work. 30 minutes to one hour later, we begin a series of quick stretch-and-folds to help develop the gluten in a gentle manner, like we do in our sourdough bread recipe. Four rounds of stretch-and-folds later, we divide the dough into two portions, plop each into a well-oiled bowl, then cover and rest overnight in the fridge to further develop the flavor and gluten network. The longer the cold rest, the more flavorful the dough—go up to 4 days if you'd like to have a little bit of sourdough-like tang to your pizza!

Save yourself a trip to the grocery store and make a double batch of this dough if you are a pizza fanatic—after developing your desired level of cold-rest tanginess in the fridge, transfer your portioned balls of dough to the freezer (either in a lightly oiled resealable plastic bag or in an airtight container) for extended storage. Prior to use, either defrost overnight in the fridge or take out to defrost on your counter at room temperature 2 hours before your intended baking time.

If you want to avoid a soggy slice, top the pie Detroit-style with cheese underneath the sauce. Assembled this way, the sauce gets slightly caramelized and perfectly reduced when exposed directly to the hot oven heat. It also serves as a protective layer and prevents the cheese from browning too much and overcooking in the 500° oven. Ever have the cheese on your cooling pizza coagulate together into a solid sheet that slides off the slice in one piece when you go in for the bite? Not sexy. Keep it sexy and keep it saucy—just keep it on top.

Chicago Style Deep Dish Pizza With Italian Sausage Recipe

Yup, that oven temp is not a typo—we're baking this baby at 500° Fahrenheit. That's about as hot as home ovens go, and it's the perfect temperature to bake at if you want a crispy-bottomed pie with a soft, tender, pillowy interior. Baking at lower temperatures will mean longer cooking times, resulting in a drier pie with a tough bite. If you're making this pizza in a cast iron skillet, we're using a 5-minute stovetop sear before the baking begins to set the crust up for crispy success—don't skip this step if you want the most gorgeously golden pie bottom even known to mankind. 

You can put whatever you want on your pie! Customize with your favorite ingredients: mushrooms, onions, sausage, pepperoni, peppers, olives, anchovies—nothing is off limits. Live your best life, eat your best pie.

If you've made this recipe, leave us a note and a rating down below to let us know how you liked it! For more cheesy pie inspiration, check out these 80+ pizza recipes!

Detroit Style Pizza

June Xie is the former Senior Food Producer for , where she hosted recipe videos and the wildly popular YouTube show, Budget Eats. She previously worked in numerous restaurant kitchens throughout NYC before first joining as our Test Kitchen Assistant and chief baking expert with a passion for bread dough, peanut butter, whipped cream, and gluten free cookies. She also loves staring at alpacas.If you want to make the very best pizza you’ve ever had, you’re going to need to start the process at least 10 hours but up to a day ahead of when you’d like to eat it. It doesn’t really require any skill-set beyond patience and the ability to follow four simple sets of directions.

Measuring your flour, water, oil, salt, and yeast by weight insures that the only variables are ones outside of your control: humidity and heat. You can compensate for humidity and heat, but you can’t compensate for four ounces too many of flour because you didn’t measure correctly.

This is not a case where you grab that teacup your mom or grandma always kept in the flour bin, plunge it into the flour, and squish it up against the edge to pack it level. Just don’t.

How To Make Cast Iron Skillet (pan) Pizza

This is a job for a scale that weighs in ounces, or -in a pinch- an occasion when you use a spoon to dip into the flour, shake it gently over the cup that you’re not shimmying in any way, and repeat until the cup is a little over full, then you use a flat edge of a butterknife or a spoon handle to level it off.

You’re going to stir it all together with a spoon, cover it, and let it go overnight or for at least 8 hours. Yes, it sits on the countertop that whole time and does not go into the refrigerator.

You’re seeking a slack dough. In fact, you’re looking for the kind of dough that will spread itself out in a well-oiled cast-iron skillet because that is exactly what you’re going to let it do.

Sheet Pan Pizza Dough Recipe (for Easy Homemade Sicilian & Grandma Pizza)

Do I have you now? Once you get to that point, the toughest part is over with, unless you include the inner battle to avoid biting down on molten hot pizza that will remove the first layer or two of skin from your mouth.

All that remains is to poke any extra large air bubbles with the back of a knuckle, lift the dough around the edges to eliminate any trapped air bubbles, and top it. Aside from the fact that the dough is DEAD easy as long as you know how to properly measure, there’s more to recommend this method.

EVERYTHING is assembled in ONE PAN. The dough spreads in one pan, is topped in the same pan, then cooked in that same pan.

The Best Pan Pizza Recipe (pizza Hut Copycat)

You don’t have to muck up and dirty all kinds of dishes, remember to preheat a pizza stone, or fiddle around with a pizza peel to make this one pizza to rule them all. All you need is a solid, cast-iron pan or two and a dose of “I’ll wait for what’s great.”

If I had to compare the Best Pan Pizza to one that’s commercially available, I would first say, “Pffft. This is better than any commercial pizza.” then I would grudgingly admit it’s rather like the Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizzas of my youth.

I loved those oil soaked, crispy bottomed, chewy little pieces of pizza heaven. The Best Pan Pizza is a little thicker than a thin-crust, but nowhere near the whole gloppy Deep-Dish pies of Chicago.

The Best Gluten Free Pan Pizza

(Not that there’s anything wrong with those, but they’re just not what we’re looking for in your every-weeknight-pizza.) They are -in short- chewy, fried-crust, pizza perfection.

It has a higher protein (read: gluten) percentage which yields a chewier/holier dough. You will not get the same results from all-purpose flour, so it is best to seek out the high-gluten flour if it is available to you. (King Arthur Bread Flour has an excellent protein percentage for this pizza dough.)

Can you use all-purpose flour? Yes. It just won’t be the same. That said, you can definitely make it and it’ll be tasty; just

Homemade Pan Pizza

Posted by bankkong639

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