Every Way to Make Pizza (32 Methods) | Bon Appétit

Hello

every

one, I'm Emil Stanek, general editor, bon appetite and these are almost all the ways to cook a

pizza

. Oh right, there's a whole world of

pizza

out there, folks, they've got thick-centered Neapolitan pines, they've got rustic Romano. Rectangle style you have the inimitable Chicago deep dish, but today we focus on a slightly modified version of a good old New York style pizza; We're looking for a slice with a thin, crispy, pleasantly golden crust that stands on its own with a top layer of beautifully decorated tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese. The challenge here is to figure out the best way to use the equipment available to home cooks to produce the kind of pie we can get at our favorite pizzeria.

Pizza, do you know? You will love it and we are going to try to cook it in all the ways we can think of before you can cook a pizza. You are shaped like a pizza. Here we have a simple dough made with bread, flour, water, salt and yeast. Let it ferment slowly in the refrigerator overnight. We used about 10 ounces of dough, which will produce about a 10-inch pizza. We will flour our work surface so that it does not stick. Place our dough there and start stretching. To

make

a nice, even round, once we shape it, we can use the backs of our hands and our kids to

make

it nice and thin.

Once it's shaped, we'll top it with our super simple sauce that's just Hulk and tomatoes. puree with garlic and olive oil and use a ladle to spread it into a thin layer, a little goes a long way, then the piece de resistance, a judicious handful of grated whole milk mozzarella cheese, let's stick the pizza peel in there and that's how bad. the boy is ready for pizza baked in the oven. Oh, right, we have our pizza on this tray and we are going to slide it into our oven that has been preheated for your pies. It's going to look like a pizza, so this is a nice one. ordinary homemade pizza the fact that the baking sheet had to be heated before the pizza cook put us at a serious disadvantage the faster the pizza dough can be connected to high heat the better, so that there is no a lot of spring the edges have a little color and looking at that slice

every

thing is a little uneven and a little soft, yes the middle is a little thick, the dough is a little dense.

I think you can do much better than this and the key will be to create a hot surface in our home oven that can mimic the overheated deck of a real pizza oven. Let's see what we can do about it. We preheat the pizza on a tray. Okay, this time we have another pizza. We'll slide it directly onto two preheated baking sheets, which will hopefully give us a little more thermal mass. About eight minutes have passed. Oh, pizza, pizza, this looks pretty good. The baking sheet was supposed to mimic the surface of a deck oven because it is.

It's already preheated and we have a nice color around the edges but overall I feel like it's a little loose, yes it looks a little wet and doughy in there, we have a nice spring around the edges but it wasn't enough to help. in the middle and it's quite pale underneath, yes, not bad, but nothing to write home about. I think it's definitely better than putting it in a cold pan, but overall I still think we can make a twice-baked pizza better. Let's try another experiment with our preheated sheet. pans, we're going to bake this circle of dough first without toppings, then we're going to take it out, cover it, and then put it back in to melt the cheese, there it is, folks, so the idea here was to give the crust a head start. before the ingredients got involved and it looks pretty good, decent browning here, although it's a little uneven when cutting, not bad, a little more spring in the oven as the sauce and cheese didn't weigh it down , is moving up well, although it made SOG. a little in the center I'm not mad about it a little crispier I still want more browning on that bottom and I'm not convinced that annoying extra step was totally worth it pizza stone pizza we had a pizza pie that we're going to slide onto our preheated ceramic pizza stone, close the oven and come back in seven eight minutes. check ours.

Looks good, we're looking at some really impressive bark color here. Ceramic retains a lot of heat and is able to deliver it very quickly and efficiently. Feels nice and crispy beautiful golden brown on top sounds crispy nice oven spring in that profile and the slice holds up pretty well very tasty well developed crust tastes nice and crispy this is definitely an improvement on our ceramic tile pizza on pans inverted and we've created two preheated unglazed ceramic tile toppers and we're just going to slide our guy right there it should be ready, that's a pizza, I love those edges, it definitely feels crispy and we have good heat all around, We basically created it like an oven within an oven, which is what I really like about this technique, cutting into that crust looks bubbly and crispy.

YUM, this one is great, maybe even a little better than our standard pizza stone and you can cover all the racks in your oven with those tiles, which means you can cook multiple pizzas at the same time, plus the tiles are cheap and easy to move, a bit of DIY, but it's a lot of fun to make steel pizza, so here we have a superheated slab of steel that we'll slide our pie onto and get it ready for grilling. for about two minutes and then lower the temperature to the normal highest baking temperature. Check this guy out and that's our baking steel pizza.

This one is really beautiful, beautiful looking, slightly charred edges, nice, even golden brown on top, very substantial cut, you will hear the crunch. I am really excited about this amazing slice of pizza, the development of the crust is exceptional. You know, I'm not one hundred percent sure that it's much better than our pizza with baking tiles or stones, but I think that if we had a little more practice with this product, we could definitely achieve it. YUM Whisper Pan Pizza, okay, so this time we're going to slide our pizza under this preheated crisper pan, which is actually just a perforated aluminum disk.

We'll check it out in about eight minutes. It smells good, okay, let's take all of this and let's take it out, that crust is a little pale for me, I mean, it's still a pretty substantial feel and there's definitely some pretty good browning on the top, but we really wish we had it. Morel on those sides cutting yes, a little flexible, it's tasty. I mean, it's definitely not as good as our other oven experiments, but I'm impressed by what we were able to get out of that thin piece of aluminum. It's really not bad at all.

Pizza Rosen, right? here we have a stretched pizza covered and then completely frozen and we are going to cook it directly on the rack and see what happens. Well, it's been about 15 minutes and they should be ready. You know, this actually looks a lot better than I thought. It was slightly warped due to the way it met the grill, but it browned decently on this side and puffed up in a funny way and I can't really explain that, let's look at a slice. It seems like it was cooked a little unevenly because it had to be defrosted before it could be cooked, so the crumb development suffered a little.

You know, it's actually extremely crispy because of the time it took to cook, but the quality of the crust was compromised a bit. works for sure, just not sure it's 100% ideal, okay, we're doing this wild style right on the shelf, we don't make too much of a mess, it smells a little like smoke, let's get this out, wait, yeah. I got you, so obviously the shape of this thing is a little wild and we had some grips on the bottom of the oven that created dough and smoke, but the crust and bottom actually look pretty good, it's kind of fun to cut out, yes, quite uneven, but definitely not as bad as I thought it would be quite crispy.

I mean, it's a complicated method, but I'm surprised at how not bad it turned out. I love the surprises of open floor pizza. Oh right, this pizza is going straight to Hell, aka the overheated floor of the oven, okay, time to rescue our pizza from certain death. I have it. I'm actually very impressed by the color we got on this one. It's a really substantial feeling when cutting into it. We have a nice bottom crust. It looks like it came from a wood oven. Pretty good spring. Attractive profile. YUM. I'm going to go ahead and say that this holds up to the other surfaces in our ovens.

The only problem is that the bottom of most people's ovens is covered in grime, but maybe this is a good excuse to clean the floor of your oven grilled pizza we have our pizza we have our preheated gas grill we'll just slide this saw right over the grates close the lid and come back when it's done okay spin Seven minutes let's check to see if it looks done it's not the smoothest pizza sure the top is definitely cooked but it didn't get enough heat , so it's a little doughy and pale, but the bottom that received the most direct heat is aggressively charred and really flavorful. looking in feels fresh and we're seeing a little bit of spring, but not much, you know, the bottom of this slice is great, but the top isn't.

I think we can do better than this baking steel grilled pizza with this pizza that we're going to make. try cooking it on a steel baking sheet that has been preheating on this grill, slide it in and close the lid, let's check it out. I don't think the bottom can hold any more, so we'll call it so the baking seal is definitely great. hot, but the grill chamber itself wasn't so hot, the edges are weak and the cheese doesn't brown, but there's definitely a healthy amount of color and char on that undercarriage when you get in there in the spring because that surface was Very hot but clearly cooked. unevenly, yes, that bottom is crispy and delicious, but the rest is not good, there is definitely potential here, even if you flip the pizzas on the grill, okay, let's try this again, we'll slide this dough out and come back in a couple of minutes, OK?

Let's turn it over and close the lid again, not bad. This seems much better to me now that we have grill marks on both sides which is a big improvement even if we don't see any reducing or bubbling in the cheese sauce layer cutting through Wow, we have a really good spring and it feels nice and crispy, that bottom is beautiful. Wow, that's so tasty, definitely different from our baked pies, but the result is undeniably delicious, beautifully developed crust, good grilled flavor. I love this if you're working with a standard grill this is the way to go okay we've got our pizza we've got our charcoal grill that's been fitted with an attachment that mimics a pizza oven that we're going to slide our pie onto. this preheated ceramic stone and we come back in about seven minutes and that's our grilled pizza, so a little bit blonder on the edges than I would like, but the bottom is what we're really excited about, that stone for pizza was definitely a lot hotter than the camera itself, that background looks great when cutting into it, you can really hear the nice crunch of the spring there because that background was very hot and the undercarriage has a beautiful leopard-like pattern , it's a little doughy for my taste.

I wish we could have closed the unit so more heat can circulate through the top but I'm not mad about it so this strange contraption is the uni pizza oven and it's been overheated with wood pellets, we'll open it up, put our pizza in and we'll close the door like this. Should be ready in no time, this is a really beautiful pie, the closest thing to a proper restaurant quality wood fired pizza, beautiful, bubbly and charred on the crust, great color, all in three minutes, looking at that slice, I'm really excited. that oven spring, yes this is an amazing slice of pizza, mmm, amazing crust development, so much texture it kills the flavor and that unmistakable wood smoke smell, if you are committed to making backyard pizza regularly , this thing really offers grandma-style pizza time for something a little different for our grandma-style pie, we'll start with a ball of dough that's about three times the size of the ones we've been working with, we've got our pan to bake, we will get a good half cup. of oil in there, spread it all over, place our dough in there and stretch it as best we can to form a rough rectangle.

Now that it is beginning to resist stretching, we will let it rest for about 30 minutes. Okay, now that our dough is. nice and pliable again, we can keep stretching it to the edges, then cover it with cheese and a few tablespoons of rustic sauce all over and then it'sready for the oven. Now we'll put it in there and bake it for about 20 minutes. at 30 minutes Oh beautiful, obviously this is a lot bigger than our other cakes, but since it filled the baking sheet I was able to get it nice and crispy where it came into contact with the sheet, let's look at this.

What I love about this method is that the pizza is almost fried in olive oil so it's nice and crispy on the bottom, we have a nice fluffy height that is so delicious, a totally different piece from our circular pies, so much more fluffy and rich, but I think this is a super accessible method for making great pizza at home that doesn't require any hassle or special equipment to achieve each pizza dish. For this Midwestern delight we have a ball of dough that is about twice the size. Our standard size we have a removable mold that has a practical and elegant mechanism that allows us to remove the wall of the dish after baking it.

We'll grease our pan, flour our work surface and roll out the dough until it's larger than our pan, place it on the pan and then try. work it so that the dough sticks to the sides taking a while, okay, great, now we are going to pave it for about 10 minutes and then it will be ready to cover it, we have a good amount of cheese and then we are going to add the tomato sauce alone to top and then bake deep dish pizza again, y'all, this bad boy is in a class, it has its own sauce on top, it has cheese in it, it's almost like a casserole, the crust browned decently thanks to that partial baking. with all that oil you know I'm not from Chicago so I'm not really sure how to cut this okay there you go you know I was skeptical but this looks really good nice crispy crust and full of bubbles .

Can't. I say I like it more than a perfect slice of New York or a good grandma, but it's definitely something special and it's not too difficult to make at home. A cool teenage mutant ninja pizza. It calls itself the most amazing pizza maker in the world. It looks so bad. let's put our pizza in and close it and now friend Bunga, so our teenage mutant ninja pizza is a little weird, it still looks a little raw and Joey over here is a little blistered, but a lot of that cheese just overflowed. It's not burnt, it's definitely cooked, cutting into it, you know, ovens sprout to talk and the whole cheese stitch seems a little crazy, yeah, bummer, never meet your heroes kids, waffle iron pizza, we got a ball of dough, we have a hot waffle iron.

We're going to put some flour on this surface, stretch our dough so it's about the right size, sauce, cheese, open our griddle and transfer our pizza there, close it, flip it over and let the terror begin, oh my, it is leaking. Wow, okay. Well I guess it's a pizza waffle, while it was cooking a lot of cheese and sauce spilled out and made a crazy mess. The pizza was too big for that griddle, so you have some raw parts here definitely burnt on this. side and the other actually looks like the bottom of a real pizza cut into this Wow, very crispy also looks very dry could be much worse definitely not getting much sauce cheese action kind of flavor like the burnt edges of a lasagna you know No I don't think anyone needs to make this pizza plus pizza, we have another pizza, we have our pizza plus a rotating pizza oven.

We're going to slide our pizza right in there, set this for 13 minutes and see what happens. I'm quite skeptical about this. one, ha, well, I guess it's hooked, so our pizzazz and it definitely did a better job of cooking the top than the bottom, that cheese was going crazy, but the bottom is very pale. I was afraid that we were going to burn the ingredients hmm, yes, not a whole. lots to see very low profile and flexible yes that's a boring slice of pizza no reason to have that thing on your counter rebel oven pizza we have a pizza we have our Breville electric countertop pizza oven it's set to 700 degrees we're going open this bad boy, we'll slide our saw in there and close the door.

Now we'll just rotate it 180 degrees and come back when it's ready. Well hello. I love how it looks. The exterior is beautifully polished. It has a great color. and because that platform was so hot, the outer crust just popped off in a way that we haven't seen much of today. The inside looks beautiful, definitely crispy, awesome color, it's an incredibly impressive slice of pizza, it's definitely an investment and if we are serious about making professional level pizza at home. This stuff definitely kills baked pizza. We have a dumpling. We have a cast iron skillet that we have been preheating.

Let's put some flour on our work surface. We stretch our dough. Make it nice and even, put a little bit of oil in this pan and then drop our dough right there. We're going to leave it like this until we have some color in the background. Okay, it looks good, now we'll turn it off. Cover it with a thin layer of sauce, a little cheese and then put it in the oven to finish cooking. Look, okay, I like the Browning on the top, but I'm not too impressed with the edges here, but the landing gear really shows through. nicely browned, let's cut into it, it definitely has a nice crispy color development underneath and it holds up really well.

YUM, I love that little extra richness and the crunchy oil it adds, it's not the most uniform thing, but if you don't have a stone. a steel or tile or something like that this is a great way to make an amazing pizza it was an old cast iron skillet stove let's see if we can eliminate the oven from the equation all together let's shape our pizza pie a little oil on that pan, put our flying saucer of dough in there, once we get a little bit of color on the first side, we're going to flip it over and cover it with sauce and cheese and then cover it so we get a little bit of melting action, like this This obviously looks pretty.

Different than most of our baking

methods

, but it is very good, the first side that took most of the oil has a fried dough texture, while the other side is more like nun or something, the cheese sausage is a little thick due to humidity. the cut had nowhere to go, there's something crunchy in there and it puffed up really nicely, in fact, you know, this really tastes so good the sauce is a little undercooked, but the olive oil flavor is great and it's nice and crispy, It looks more like a flatbread. kind of like a traditional pizza, but it's kind of tasty, still boiled.

Pizza things are about to get weird. We are going to stretch the dough a little less than we have before putting a little sauce. A little bit of cheese. Let's fold this. To make a small ball of pizza dough, seal it as tightly as possible, then we will gently lift it and slide it into the water. We'll let it sit for about 10 minutes, it's easy, and that, my friends, is a boiled pizza. the set hasn't changed any browning and has a sticky, almost pierogi-like texture that feels like a tasty squirt. Cut it into a few different strips, so we managed to melt the cheese inside and the dough is actually almost cooked, which is impressive.

To give it a try, it's not like any pizza I've had before, but it's not bad in itself either. It would be much better if we finished it in a pan with a little butter and onion or something, but I honestly don't do that. I don't hate it, fried pizza, fried pizza time, we'll take another ball of pizza dough and dip it in some 350 degree oil and see what happens, and I guess it's fried pizza, okay, so yeah , it obviously looks like a deep dish pizza. fried calzone the outside has a cooled bubbly fried texture but it still feels quite tender and puffed up a lot, sure we cut it steaming dangerous so I probably could have stuffed it more but I didn't want it to explode and it's almost cooked. some pieces that could have used a little more time, you know, I'm not going to lie, it tastes amazing.

I mean, it's fried dough, cheese and sauce. I wish we had made it as a calzone with just cheese inside and sauce. dipping it certainly isn't pizza, but it doesn't stink. Steamed pizza. Well, we have a pizza. We have a bamboo steamer. Let's slide that pizza right there. Oops, rearrange it a little, close the lid and come back for our dim sum pizza. Surprise Wow, that's something so clear that it didn't brown, it seemed to be cooked and it has a strange texture like a pillow, but the inside didn't hold up very well and it's quite thick, it's almost rolled up like quite difficult to cut in the usual way.

Yes, very weak, believe me when I say I've eaten worse things while making this show, it doesn't taste like pizza, but it's definitely not inedible. I mean, the dough is cooked and the cheese is melted, what more could you ask for? for pizza in stovetop oven, now we are going to try a different freestanding pizza oven, this one is ceramic and works with the gas burner, we will open it, come this way to slide our pizza in and close the door, open it again new and there is our cake from the beginning. I really like this color that we're getting around the edges, especially these nice blistered bits, very attractive and underneath we have a nice speckled crust, that bottom surface clearly gets very, very hot, which we have a hint of. more heat on top though cut ooh this sounds legit, great oven spring, beautiful cheetah pattern.

Wow, great texture, great flavor, if I'm picky I wish the cheese was browned a little more but this is definitely up there with the best you know. Starting to feel a little stuffy in here, let's get to the pizza stone pizza in the backyard. Oh right, we've been preheating this pizza stone on this campfire for about 20 minutes and we're just going to slide this pie onto this superheated slab. ceramic Oops, that's burning quite a bit, let's take it off, so it's clearly quite undercooked here and then practically blackened on the bottom, let's get in there, yeah, it's definitely still very soggy, yes, very burnt but also very raw at the same time , too hot underneath. not enough about black wood grilled pizza, so here we have a circle of dough, we're going to slide it right onto this rack, then we're going to turn it over, cover it with cheese sauce and let it finish cooking and that's our wood grilled pizza.

This one puffed up a little bit like our grilled pizza and it's a little thick here because there wasn't much heat applied on that side, but we have a nice color on the bottom crust, I probably could have built it up. light a little more spring cut nice but still a little doughy around the edges good crunch nice wood smoke flavor this is more of a flatbread than a pizza and we could have modified the method a little but it's not bad at all camping pot pizza Okay, we're going to put some olive oil in our preheated camping pot and then we're going to throw our mini pizza in there, we're going to close the lid and that's kind of a pizza, I guess definitely very thick in the middle and at the bottom. a little fried, it's a little burnt around the bottom edges but otherwise it looks pretty smoky, it's cut and we can see it's still bad, yeah no, not a good way to make a pizza, no thanks .

Pizza Easy Bake Oven Oh right, we've got our Easy Bake oven, we've got our little pizza, we're going to slide it in, it's a little stuck, there we go and we're going to check this for good, now we use this weird tool to get it out. I got it and that's our easy baked pizza, let me see if I can get this out of here. Oh, spoiler alert, it's not that hot, so yeah, it's a little overcooked, the cheese is barely melted, it's hard to tell if it's raw or not, it's very soggy, yeah. No, nothing good, nothing bad, I think this is a sign that we should go back to the inside of microwave pizza, we have a pizza pie, we have a microwave, let's open this up, give it a good spritz, slide in our pizza inside, close the door and place. for three minutes and thirty seconds Wow, okay, so I mean it certainly melted and the sauce was definitely cooked, that external confidence filled clearly hard and last in a way that I can't really explain, really hard to get a cutter pizza, there you go, gah Wow. that's really strange, the inside is flexible and soft but the outside is hard like cardboard, this is a terrible way to cook a pizza.

Pizza in pizza cone, ooh, okay, another strange one, folks, let's punch this shape here, fold it and seal it. With this patented crimping device, place it on this silicone cone, then we'll bake it in a 470 degree oven for about six minutes. Okay, now we'll take our dough cone and fill it with sauce and cheese and then bake it until the inside turns into a dangerous molten slurry, shut up Pizza cone, this thing looks demonic to me, like an animal horn meant to a satanic ritual, a decent gilding around the edge, although it isvery wet in there, terrified I'd burn myself eating this to be honest.

I find the crunch to be somewhat appealing, but otherwise this eating experience does absolutely nothing for me, it's just as good, don't mess with pizza, hydrated pizza, we have a dehydrator here, it's set to 158 degrees , which is the highest setting I'm going to take. Take the thing off, slide it in, close the lid, and come back in four and a half hours. It seems dry. Alright. This should look more like concept art made on pizza than an actual pizza. Let's cut it. Wow, it's very hard on the outside and very sticky and dry. in the middle and very thin, I mean, it almost has a wicked kind of crunch to it, oh, it's so raw that it rehydrates in my mouth as I chew it, this is disgusting, bad, not good, okay, we cooked a lot of pizzas today. in different ways, what do we learn well for high heat and thermal mass are the name of the game?

The quicker you can apply even, sustained heat to that dough, the better the end result will be. There are many simple and very effective ways to hack your home. oven to produce a pie at the level of a closed pizzeria and there are also some serious commercial devices that are really impressive and many that really aren't have a favorite way of cooking a pizza that you didn't see here today. that's in the comments