Cast Iron Pan Pizza

****LINKS****

****RECIPE****

10-inch Cast Iron Pan Pizza
Serves two — if you want to feed more people, you need more pans

1/4 teaspoon active dry yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1/2 cup warm water
1-1.5 cups flour (bread or all purpose)
1/2 teaspoon salt
olive oil
cornmeal
oregano
additional salt
pepper
1/3 cup canned pureed tomatoes (I like Pastene "Kitchen Ready" ground tomatoes)
additional sugar
fresh basil
grated parmesan
4 ounces whole milk, low moisture mozzarella, grated and kept cold
1 jalapeño pepper (optional), thinly sliced

Mix the yeast, sugar and warm water together in a bowl and let sit for 5 minuets. If the yeast float to the top and start to go foamy, that means they're alive and you're good to proceed. Put in one cup of flour and the 1/2 teaspoon of salt, mix until it comes together, flour your hands and start kneading. Keep adding flour as needed to keep the dough from being untenably sticky, but don't add too much; it should be pretty wet and sticky at the end. Knead until you can stretch it out thin without it tearing. Form the dough into a smooth ball, coat it and the inside of the bowl with olive oil, cover, and let rise — either for at least 24 hours in the fridge, or 1-2 hours at room temperature — until doubled in size.

In a 10-inch cast iron pan (or 10-inch Teflon pan), pour in enough olive oil to coat the bottom well. Put in a pinch of cornmeal, a little oregano, lots of black pepper and a small pinch of salt. Mix that together with your fingers and spread the seasoned oil around the bottom, corners and edges of the pan. Before you wash your hands, grab the risen dough ball and stretch it out a little wider than the pan. Put it in the pan, and let ir proof in there for a half hour, until puffy.

For the sauce, combine the tomatoes with a glug of olive oil, a pinch of sugar, and a few torn leaves of fresh basil. Make sure your cheese is ready and kept cold in the fridge.

Put the pan on your largest burner. Turn the burner on medium and your oven's broiler (grill) on high. Spoon the sauce onto the dough and spread it edge to edge. After the heat has been on for about 5 minutes, sprinkle the pizza with parmesan and then the mozzarella, edge to edge. Put on the jalapeño slices (or any other toppings, or not), and get ready to transfer the pizza to the oven. It's hard to tell when the right moment is — in my cast iron pan, 7-8 minutes from the time I turn on the burner is the perfect time, but it takes practice. The best indicator may be your nose — the second you smell something starting to burn, move the pizza. Broil it on a high rack until the top is brown to your liking, 4-5 minutes.

Remove the pizza and let it cool in the pan until firm. Use a butter knife to release the rim of browned cheese from the pan, and then pull the pizza out with tongs. The bottom may stick a bit — you can either try to scrape under there to release it, or simple tear it off with the tongs, it should be solid enough after cooling down to come out intact.

[aragusea]

Q: Didn't Babish just make a video about pan pizza? Are you just copying him?

Q: What do you mean it's safe for me to broil this in a non-stick pan?
A: According to my infrared thermometer tests, the exposed rim of my pan only hit about 350 F under the broiler before the pizza was done. Nonstick pans don't start breaking down until at least 570 F. In a test, it took my pan 20 minutes to get that hot directly under the broiler, totally empty. Again, you'll get a deep-dive on Teflon safety in Monday's vid.

Q: Did you accidentally release this video early?
A: I always upload my videos a couple days early as unlisted, because I need to send them to experts for fact-checking, and to sponsors for approval. Apparently there is a bug in YouTube's system, where if you assign an unlisted video to a public playlist, it will be listed via that playlist, so at least 50 people were able to watch this one early as a result. Won't make that mistake again!

Q: Can I get one of those vintage restored cast iron pans your friend gave you?

[anthonyjones]

Jokes on you adam, i seasoned my hands before kneading the dough

[kilimenjiro]

"Rev up your meme machines."
Have we become too predictable?

[kylesutherland]

When he said rev up your meme machines I thought he was going to fill the pan with white wine

[raymon]

“Why did my father abandon me as a child?”

S Q U A R E S P A C E

[hohaiphong]

2:48 who else thought he was gonna pour white wine in the pan?

[notusneo]

The madman finally did it he literally seasoned the pan

[Rahnotrob]

I just did this and it came out amazing. I made some variations with the pan seasoning (minced garlic, dried basil, oregano and italian parsley) and I rubbed the top of the dough with a little bit of olive oil. My toppings were minimal as well (diced fresh onion, diced jalapeno, crimini mushrooms, and prosciutto. It came out killer.

[DangerNuggett]

"rev up your meme machines boys and girls, I'm going to season my pan not my pizza"

My god, he's become self aware. Shut it down everyone

[rohinsharma]

“The wetter it is the better it tastes”

[praisingintensifies]

"Rev up your meme machines boys and girls."


Yeah, he's a dad.

[chef-fred]

Adam, I have to tell you that this still is my favourite pizza recipe. Pizza comes out perfect every single time. Completely foolproof I intend on purchasing a few more cast iron pans just to have them on hand for pizza parties once this pandemic is done with. Yesterday what I did was cut the dough in half. The result, when carefully stretched over a 12 inch pan, was a paper thin crust that came out crispy and not at all dry. My son just loved it. I did end up taking the in skillet cook down to 5 minutes from the 7 - 8 minutes I usually take with the full recipe.

[SpartanHighKing]

I'll season my mouth, eat the dough raw, then jump in the oven.

[isthissomesortofmeme]

Square space sponsor in a pizza video I guess someone loves trigonometry

[infectedruby]

“The wetter it is, the better it tastes”

“Wow! That is soft and sticky”

“Now this is when I go spoon on my sauce”

[ThatGamerDude]

For anyone curious about weights, I just got the following when making the dough myself:
Sugar 1 tsp = 3.8 g (or round to 4 g)
Warm water 1/2 cup = 113.5 g (or roughly 230 g/cup)
Yeast 1/4 tsp = 0.9 g ≈ 1 g (or 1 tsp = 4 g)
AP Flour 1 cup = 161.3 g (or round to 160g/cup)
I forgot to add olive oil to the water before the flour (not a crucial step to skip), but when coating for storage, my splash of olive oil was 7 g.
I also thought if I zeroed the bowl and weighed the final dough ball, I could approximate the amount of flour I added after the first cup, but it turns out my final dough ball weighed less than the sum of the ingredients I put in the bowl before I added flour to prevent sticking to hands (some flour stuck to the bowl, fork, and my hands, and wouldn't incorporate into the dough, so that's probably the missing weight). Can't be much added flour if the dough ball is still less than the sum of the ingredients.

[povgames]

this is just a clever tutorial on how to drink olive oil without admitting it

[bigpapa]

I will season my tongue, not the food.

[michaelc]

Why I squarespace my pizza not my cast iron pan

[TeaDrinkingColonist]

"The wetter it is, the better it tastes"
*replaces all ingredients with water*