Pizza! Delicious, comforting pizza. It’s one of our most craved fast foods whenever things are relatively normal, nevermind when we’re not allowed to leave the house. And, while ordering a mega lockdown meal deal for four between two people is still sometimes what’s required, making your own pizza is undoubtedly a more rewarding (not to mention tasty) alternative. This recipe is more than a little bit inspired by Bon Appetit‘s cast iron pizza recipe, although we found our pizza base took a little longer to crisp up in the skillet. Regardless, this is a great way to both indulge in a Friday-night pizza and make your own pizza with your favourite toppings.
Shop-bought pizza dough works fine here – assuming you can get it – and if not there are plenty of good dough recipes out there. In truth, the most important ingredient in this recipe is probably the cast iron skillet. Assuming you don’t have access to a commercial-grade pizza oven or a readily available wood-fired oven, using cast iron is as good a substitute as possible – pre-heating it in your oven first gets it skin-blisteringly hot, helping create that cripsy pizza crust we all know and love.
Aside from that, use a bit of what you fancy. We actually produced two versions of this cast iron pizza: the below which sticks closely enough to the original Bon Appétit recipe and adds a few lashings of honey (it works), and a gout-inducing blue cheese and fig pizza. Use whatever works – you’ve eaten pizza before, you’re up to speed.
- It’s easy– Once your dough is ready to go into your skillet, the pizza takes about 12 minutes in the oven to cook. The 5-10 minutes where you need to leave it to cool down will seem like the longest part.
- Mix it up – As mentioned, you can literally put anything on top of this. Make whatever pizza you would normally order. Be the pizza you want to see in the world.
- Feeling fancy? Fill your boots – The below recipe uses shop-bought dough and pre-made marinara/tomato sauce – there’s no reason you can’t make both of these yourself (what else have you got going on, eh?), and this’d be all the more delicious for it.
NOTES
Be patient and let your oven get up to max temperature – it’s what will make the pizza crusty and delicious.
Easy Skillet Pizza
Ingredients
- 400 g Shop-Bought Pizza Dough
- Olive Oil
- 3 Pork & Fennel Sausages
- 50 g Prepared Marinara/Tomato Sauce
- 200 g Grated Mozzarella
- 3 Garlic Cloves; thinly sliced/minced
- 2 Red Chillies; chopped
- Fresh Basil Leaves
- Honey
Instructions
- Place rack in the top oven shelf and preheat oven to max temperature.
- Place dough on kitchen top/work surface and drizzle with olive oil. Turn to coat, and stretch out to roughly a 10" pizza shape – you want your dough to be roughly the same size and shape as your skillet. Cover loosely with plastic wrap once stretched out.
- Heat oil in your skillet over medium heat. Remove sausage meat from casings and break up into skillet, cooking until browned and cooked through (6-8 mins).
- Remove skillet from heat and carefully lay pizza dough inside. Season base with salt, then spread marinara/tomato sauce over the base of the dough. Top with mozzarella, then add garlic, cooked sausage, and chillies. Give the pizza a final drizzle of olive oil.
- At this point, your pizza base should have started to crisp up a little bit from the residual heat in the skillet – if it hasn't, set over medium heat for another 3-5 minutes or so.
- Place skillet on the oven's top rack until crust is browned to your liking and the cheese is bubbling and golden brown – around 12 minutes. Let pizza cool for five minutes, then top with fresh basil and drizzles of honey. Sprinkle with flaky salt and tuck in.
If you’re after a Friday night fakeaway meal, you’ll probably want to check out our Sesame Chicken & Egg Fried Rice recipe.
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