Cast Iron Pizza

How to make proper pizza at home

What makes a real pizza? Heat. Your oven can't produce enough heat to bake a pizza the way a pizza oven does. Luckily, if you have the right tools, you can fake it.

You Will Need

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Making Dough

Ingredients

If you have a bread machine with a dough setting, use that. Just put the water and oil in first, then the flour, then the yest and salt, and set it to "dough mode".

If you don't have a bread machine, the recipe is from here. Go ahead and make it, then come on back.

When your dough is ready, split it into 6 balls. Grab as many balls as you have skillets to cook them with, and coat them in olive oil in a bowl.

Get your dough nice and greasy

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Making the Pizza

Ingredients

Here's what's about to happen:

Before you do anything else, prepare your toppings.

Sauce and cheese are essential, anything else is optional. You shouldn't use too many ingredients, though — if you put too much on the dough it may not cook as much as you hope.

In addition to sauce and cheese, I'm using mushrooms and fresh basil as toppings.

Get everything ready before you start with the heat. You won't have much time after.

Flour the cutting board in advance, too.

Right about now, you can turn on the heat. Put all your skillets on high heat, and put your oven on the highest broiler setting as well. Set a timer for about 9 minutes, for everything to heat up.

If you have a fan, turn it on now.

Prepare the pizzas. Don't make them bigger than your skillet.

Apply sauce.

Add cheese and toppings. I saved the basil for after.

There are no pictures of this part; you'll definitely need both hands.

Use the cutting board/peel to gently deposit the pizza into the hot pan. Immediately get the pan into the oven, right under the broiler.

Get a cooling rack ready.

It'll take about 5 minutes tops to cook. Don't leave.

You'll know it's done when the crust has those tasty charred bits.

Get them onto a cooling rack, asap

You're done! If you did it right, everything should be nice and melted, and the crust should be bubble and have a good char on it. Congratulations! I'll leave you two alone.

The basil really pulls the room together

This is the last one.