Pizza obsession
Late night a couple of days ago I stumbled across a YouTube video experimenting with various recipes attempting to recreate New York style pizza at home. Perhaps I was hungry, but I wound up sitting through 3 of the videos and began obsessing about baking some pizza.
I was thinking I needed to go out and buy a pizza stone…although I am seeing many of these videos suggesting a “pizza steel”. As I tried to figure out how I would explain buying a pizza stone after having Jennifer buy me a cast iron griddle for grilling smash burgers (a previous YouTube initiate obsession), I pondered if cast iron was an acceptable alternative to a pizza stone. Some googling the next morning indicated a resounding “yes”.
Many of the videos talked about using a cast iron frying pan for making the pizza, and as more options were discussed they suggested using a Staub pan…and it turns out we have one of them. Official meant for paella, the 13.5 in pan is meant to be used on the stove top or in the oven.
So for my first experiment, I went to the local DiCicco’s and purchase some dough, sauce and pepperoni (we already had some mozzarella)
- DiCicco’s house brand Mozzarella (whole milk)
- Rau’s pizza sauce
- Boar’s Head sliced/packaged pepperoni
- Terranova Bakery pizza dough
The store had a surprisingly large selection of pizza sauces:
I coated the cold pan with some olive oil and the heated the oven to 500 degrees with the pan inside. While the oven and pan heated, I tried to work the dough. Initially I tried by hand…and worked in some olive oil into the dough. Eventually I transitioned to a rolling pin and then stretched the dough by hand. (I tried spinning it but need much more practice.) Eventually, I wound up with this:
When the oven and pan came to temperature, it was time to transfer the pie to the pan. This proved to be more difficult than expected. I suspect I needed to dust the parchment with more flour after the rolling stage. I thought I was going to wind up with a folder pizza/Stromboli but was able to “mostly” recover.
After 20 minutes in the oven, this was my result:
Not the prettiest, but certainly edible. While crispy and well browned on the bottom, the pie was pretty flavorless. Jen thinks it is the Rau’s sauce, which she says never really has much flavor.
I bought a second dough ball ($3.99) and will have to try again, perhaps doctoring the sauce or trying one of the others.
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