Pan Pizza

Ingrédients

Dough:

384 grams bread flour - can use all-purpose flour

11 grams salt

7grams instant yeast

20 grams olive oil

307 grams water

20 grams olive oil - lubrication for the pan

Toppings:

219 grams pizza sauce

225 grams A 50/50 blend of low and high moisture mozzarella cheese

128 grams pepperoni slices

Instructions

Add flour, salt, and yeast to a medium-sized bowl and stir all dry ingredients until thoroughly combined.

Measure and add the first of the two portions of olive oil and the water to the medium-sized bowl with the flour mixture, and stir everything for 2 to 3 minutes to ensure that all dough components are combined and there are no dry flour spots. The dough will be very sticky and probably difficult to handle with your hands, so keep using a spoon or silicone spatula. Stir until no dry flour spots are left.

Try to arrange your dough into a ball shape, cover the bowl with plastic wrap or a lid, and allow the dough to rise in a warm spot in your kitchen for 1 hour or until it's almost doubled in size

Add dough to the pan: add the second addition of olive oil to the pan you're going to use to bake and tilt the pan to spread the oil all around. It may seem like a lot of oil but it needs to coat the bottom. Add the still-sticky dough from the bowl on top of the olive oil in the pan and moisten your fingertips with some of the olive oil to prevent sticking. Using your olive-oiled fingertips, press the dough to flatten it and try to get the dough to reach close to all four corners of the pan. Flipping the dough after you've flattened it will help to coat the dough thoroughly with olive oil and make it easier to handle with your fingers. Cover the pan and let the dough rest for another hour.

At the end of the second rise time, turn on your oven to 450 degrees F (230 C).

While the oven is preheating, deflate any large bubbles rising above the dough with your fingers.

Toppings: this part is where you can choose your own adventure. I have offered some guidance in the form of gram/ounce weight for sauce and cheese (and pepperoni) but feel free to use more or less. Also, feel free to change up the order of ingredients. If you want the cheese on top of the meat, go for it.

I do not typically sauce my pan pizza like they do in Detroit (with stripes of sauce). I will apply an even but light layer of sauce across the top of the whole dough, all the way to the corners. Just be careful not to push too hard on the surface of the dough. You don't want to knock out too much of the gas that the dough has built up.

Shred the cheese or cut it into 1/4-inch squares. Add the cheese on top of the sauce, making sure that some of the cheese is in the corners between the dough and the pan. This is how you will get a nice crispy dark-colored crust because the cheese will caramelize from the heat of the metal pan.

Then after the sauce and the cheese are added, feel free to add any toppings. If you are using pepperoni, make sure to cover the top of the pizza from edge to edge with pepperoni. The pepperoni slices will shrink during the cooking process and if you don't have a full layer when it goes into the oven, the pizza will look much more sparsely covered than you might hope. My advice: use more pepperoni than you might think you need.

Bake: after the oven has preheated, bake the pizza for 25 to 30 minutes. After 25 minutes if the cheese on the edges and the top of the pizza isn't quite as brown as you would like, you can raise the rack in your oven to the very top and bake at the top of the oven for an additional 5 minutes to add extra color.

If you used cast iron, you might want to peek under the bottom of the pizza to see if the bottom is as dark as you would like. If not, you can place the cast iron pan directly on the stove eye over medium-high heat for 2 to 3 minutes. Check the bottom again but it should brown quickly on the stove.

Carefully remove the pizza from the pan and put it on a cooling rack to cool before slicing.