Cooking with Haircut: Pizza

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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3,926
Location
SW London
Just made a pizza that turned out extremely well, so thought I'd stick a post up about it.
I've cooked loads of pizzas before, but none using this cooking method, and after this experience I reckon I'll be doing it like this in the future.

Basically, proper pizza ovens get to much hotter temperatures than the average home oven.
Solution: use a frying pan and a grill.
I got the technique from this site: http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2010/09/how-to-make-great-neapolitan-pizza-at-home.html, which explains a bit more about it.

Effectively, you but the pizza in a hot, heavy frying pan, dump on the toppings and put the whole lot under a hot grill.
I decided to do it properly and put the grill and frying pan on at least 10 minutes before cooking so everything was blisteringly hot when the pizza went in.

Dough was simply made in my bread maker with a base made of crushed tinned plum tomatoes, then ham, red onions, jalapenos, mozzarella and parmesan as the toppings.

Unfortunately I don't have any before pictures as it was only afterwards that I thought 'damn, this looks good' and took a couple of quick snaps.

After cooking is where all the action is though, crust is risen nicely around the edges and is nice and charred from the grill, just like you would get in a proper wood fired oven.
Best of all, because you put it in a hot frying pan the underside ends up much the same way with a nice crispy base.

Obviously you can only cook one pizza at a time like this, but it's done in 3-4 minutes so doing a few won't take long at all.

Anyway, on to the pictures...

pizza1u.jpg


And, just to please everyone - here's one with a bit of depth of field :p

pizza2c.jpg
 
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Soldato
Joined
5 Feb 2009
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15,910
Location
N. Ireland
you **** haircut, if you were anywhere near me i'd come over and slap you silly, you've made me so hungry, i live in the sticks and all fast food joints are long since closed :mad:

damn that looks so tasty, cream crackers and cheese just aint gonna cut it :(
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
3,926
Location
SW London
I've always had great success with a pizza stone and a blazing hot oven.

+1 for pizza stone in the oven. I also have a big gas weber grill that along with the pizza stone produces excellent results.

Using a pizza stone in a hot oven was my method of choice as well (though never tried it in a bbq).
You can certainly get some great pizzas that way, but after last night's pizza I definitely prefer this technique. It was the crust that was the difference really, the hotter temperature definitely seems to improve things.

I'm planning on doing some naan breads like this next as I reckon they'd be well suited to this method of cooking.
 
Soldato
Joined
12 Apr 2004
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Location
Somewhere
Awesome, that's lunch sorted for today – thanks!

All I have in the house in the way of flour is the strong wholemeal I usually use for bread – will this work for the base? I'm not too bothered about authenticity as long as it tastes nice :cool:
 
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