Last week I only had the desire to eat bagels and pizza. Does anyone else get into a “food mood”?
These food anti-cravings I have are annoying. They cause me to be grossed out by basically everything that is even remotely good for me. Worse, this type of food is not good material for food blogging either. Even my husband, who doesn’t get sick of food easily, said while eating the fourth bagel of the week “we should probably have real food.” I blame stress at work, getting a flu shot and feeling like crap, and having a cavity filled last week. My arm was so sore from the shot that it hurt all day, even when I wasn’t moving it. Driving was not fun. I hate cavities and this one had the side effect of making my tooth sensitive. I had a lot of Novocain when it was filled and I spent half the day where I couldn’t feel half of my lips. In fact, it was so much that my left nostril was numb. Boy was that weird feeling. Here’s to a better week (both eating wise and all around).
In an attempt to work with my food mood, we made pizza, but in a skillet! Have you ever tried this? It’s like a deep dish pizza but without all the grease that typically comes with one. We even joked that it was like certain deep dish pizza chain’s pizza, but where the oil needed was measured in teaspoons instead of quarts.
I’m not really one for blogging about fancy pizza topping combinations. It’s fun to see people’s creative concoctions and at the end of the day I think most people will do their own thing. We made a standard issue pepperoni pizza (because that’s my boo’s favorite). This is less of a recipe, and more of a nifty set of instructions about how to cook pizza in a different way.
My husband was skeptical when I told him that I wanted to make this. How will it taste different than a regular pizza you throw on a baking pan or stone? The short answer is that it still tastes like pizza, but it’s got some extra fun stuff going on.
Somehow the pizza crust is magically thicker than if you had rolled it out thick onto flat surface. This was actually rather convenient. Less fighting with the dough, no rolling anything out, and it came out amazing.
The pizza crust had a tiny bit of fried texture on the edges from the oil you put in the skillet or possibly from delicious cheese grease. When you bite into a piece the crust is lovely and chewy on the inside. Gosh, I wish we had leftovers.
Skillet Pizza Recipe
(Makes 2 personal size pizzas)
Ingredients:
- 1 recipe of Pizza Dough
- 1 tablespoon oil (divided per the directions)
- some pasta or pizza sauce
- some cheese
- (optional) some toppings
Directions:
- Make the pizza dough. We did the overnight rise version which isn’t mentioned in the post about the dough. Basically you just make the dough and put the bowl in the fridge overnight and pull it out a couple hours before making the pizza.
- Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.
- Divide the pizza dough in half.
- Coat a 10 inch oven safe skillet (cast iron is a great choice) with 1/2 tablespoon of oil. I use the Lodge skillet.
- Talk half of the pizza dough and place it into the skillet. Spread it around the bottom of the skillet with your fingers. It’ll take a little doing but it sure was easier than rolling it out.
- Lay on the sauce.
- Throw on some cheese.
- (Optional) If you’re feeling adventurous, go for 1 or 40 toppings.
- Bake the pizza in the preheated oven for about 17 minutes or until the crust has browned and the cheese has a few browned spots. (I rotated the skillet half way through the cooking time. I don’t think it’s required but it does help even out the browned spots.)
- Be careful… Every pan is hot when you take it out of the oven, but since we are dealing with a cast iron skillet in a 450 degree oven here, I felt it worthy of reminding you to take care because it will stay hot for quite a while.
Note: You don’t need to use a cast iron skillet. You only need to make sure your skillet is oven safe at 450 degrees F.
Adapted from: Minimalist Baker
It might be obvious but I’ll point it out (because that’s what us lawyers do), our experience with this pizza was grand because we used our favorite ingredients and made our own dough. You can certainly use uncooked store-bought pizza dough, but I won’t be responsible for crappy pizza if you used crappy dough. 🙂
