Grandma Pie

We heard from many of you that it would be helpful to get tips on skillet pizzas after our reachout over the Pizza Griddle. At the risk of this becoming an all-pizza newsfeed, here's how we would do it in the 12" Braising Skillet. 

Our home oven is broken, so we did this in the shop's seasoning oven! (See also: steak cooked on the furnace)

 

Before we get into the dough, let's talk sauce! With a glut of CSA tomatoes coming into the house weekly, we are making and freezing sauce to keep up. 

Marcella Hazan's succinct recipe makes for a bright sauce that smells incredible. It classically calls for a can of tomatoes, but subbing fresh anything Roma or Plum-adjacent is perfection.     

 

One key difference between cooking a pizza in a skillet vs the Pizza Griddle is the cooking speed. The preheated Pizza Griddle cooks a pie super fast, allowing little opportunity for the crust to get soggy. You can't cook a pizza on another surface as quickly and many recipes call for you to par-bake the crust as a workaround, which is a pain. For this reason, we like the "Grandma Pie" style for a skillet pizza. It has a one-step cook process, but does need in-skillet rise time to prepare the dough to accept toppings. Olive oil in the dough helps release it from the skillet without sticking. 

We cooked this one in our conveyor style industrial seasoning oven, not unlike what a high volume pizza kitchen might have, but a preheated home oven works in a pinch 😉. We've adapted the below from The Pizza Bible by Tony Gemignani. He specifies a custom recipe for Sicilian-style dough as a base, but for our industrial cooking adventure, we used store-bought. 14oz/ 400g of dough is a good size for the 12" Braising Skillet.

1. Allow 14oz/ 400g dough to rest until it comes to room temperature
2. Pre-heat the oven to 500ºF and lightly oil the skillet
3. When the dough is ready, place the ball in the center of the skillet and lightly press it out across the full cook surface using your fingertips. If it shrinks back from the edge let it rest 10-15 min and lightly press it out again
4. When you're done poking it, let it rest uncovered until nearly doubled in thickness - about an hour
5. Add your toppings: cheese first, and then sauce. Protect that puffy crust!
6. Bake for 15 minutes (or set the conveyor to 3 feet per minute, lol)

You should be able to pop the cooked pizza right out of the skillet with a spatula!

 

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Related: Pizza Griddle FAQ,  5-Minute Pizza