Pan Pizza

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.

A dough like no other

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. 

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!

Use it or freeze it.

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.

Cheese first, then sauce.

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.

Bake it hot.

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. 

And to top it off—

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!