Cast Iron Skillet Pizza

What kind of pizza leaves a thirty five year impression? Let me describe it to you. The crust is slightly charred. It has a crisp outer layer, but inside it's airy and light. The toppings aren't piled high but evenly distributed and are perfectly balanced. It's sweet, salty, full flavored but not greasy. The tomatoes burst with flavor. Each bite makes you hungrier for the next. The quote above is from Jeff Varasano. His Pizzeria was voted 'Best Pizza in Atlanta' for 2012.
                                                                                                             

My grandmother and grandfather both came from Palermo Sicily so I was raised in an ethnic Italian home. At the time, my mother had Multiple Sclerosis and needed family and hospital care so I lived with my grandparents because my mother would come home to their house on the weekends. All of the family would gather there every Sunday to eat dinner, visit with mom and prepare the food.

Grandma would cook small ten inch pizzas in an old stove that was in the cellar. She would make ten or twenty pies for everybody to eat while they cooked the dinner. These pies weren't fancy by any means. Just simple food. A crust with homemade crushed canned tomatoes that she canned herself, and some Parmesan cheese. That's it. Simple. But a taste that I will never forget or will ever be able to duplicate no matter how hard I try. But, I'm getting closer. Mom passed away shortly thereafter and the family sort of moved on.  Sunday dinners happened less and less and after Grandma passed away, dinners were no more.

I was sixteen when I got my first job in New York hauling flower sacks down to the basement of Patsy's Pizzeria on 1st Avenue. I guess that I fell in love with pizza then. If you ever go to New York, you have got to have a pizza at Patsy's. One of the best in the city. Over the years I've worked in many pizzerias and even owned one. So I guess that you could say that pizza has been a part of my life for over fifty years.

I retired from "Al & Tony's Pizzeria" my restaurant on Vashon Island Washington. Vashon Island sits in the Puget Sound off the coast of Seattle. When I moved to Vashon, there wasn't any pizza on the island. You had to go and take a ferry ride to Seattle to buy one, or get a frozen one at the Thriftway. So, I opened the only pizzeria on the island. By the time that I retired, you could get pizza everywhere on the island...even at the Shell station. Go figure. Now I stay home and enjoy home life with my wonderful wife and cook all kinds of food, especially pizza..

Now, after you retire, and after you've been making pizzas for so many years, you get used to the "Old Pizza Pan" ways of making pizzas, so you go out to a commercial restaurant supply house and buy a few good pans and a pizza peel, a pizza knife and and every essential pizza making equipment that you could think of, and before you know it, you've spent a few hundred dollars and you leave there with enough equipment to open another pizzeria. At least you didn't buy the wood fire pizza oven...Old habits are hard to lose.

Every Wednesday night is pizza night at our house. It's been that way for years. I guess I've made every style of pizza that you could think of and I have to admit, they're getting better each time. But, tonight I decided to try something different...no, not a different type of pizza but a different way of baking the pie. I'm using a cast iron skillet. I had never tried this in all the years of making pizza, so this night is a first. As this is my first attempt at a food blog, please try to overlook any mistakes because I swear that I will get better.

I set my oven at 500 degrees and let it come up to temp. On most electric ovens, the electronics won't let you go above 500 degrees, which is about 300 degrees short of what is needed to cook a good and fast pizza. Try baking cookies at 75 degrees instead of 375 and see how it goes. High heat is needed to quickly char the crust before it has a chance to dry out and turn it into a biscuit. So set your oven as high as you can. Still, 500 degrees is hot enough for home cooking.

As I got ready to start the pizza, I saw all of the pizza equipment that was sitting in the pantry ready to come out and take over. Throwing a blanket over all of my fancy food equipment that I purchased, I took out my cast iron skillet. I can't tell you the guilt that I felt.

I oiled the pan with olive oil and sprinkled a bit of corn meal in to the pan, just to make sure that the pizza wouldn't stick.

I prepared the dough and got it ready to put it into the skillet. 

I placed the dough into the skillet and pushed it out to conform to the pan.

After the dough was in the pan, I turned a burner on the stove top to medium high. On my stove which is electric, that's a #7 on the knob. For a gas stove use whatever you feel will work.

Now here is my first screw up, I was supposed to use a fork to punch holes in the dough before I put the sauce on, so that the dough wouldn't get all bubbly while pre-cooking on the burner. The reason for cooking the dough first on the stove top, is that it cooks the bottom of the crust partially and sets the crust. Just remember to poke the dough before you put the sauce on and put it on the burner. 

Here's the photo of the raw dough with sauce on it while it is being poked. I was trying to Fix my screw up.

I set the skillet on the burner to cook the bottom of the crust. I found that about 5 minutes was plenty of time to get it done.

Earlier I had partially pre-cooked the sausage, which I had removed from the casings,along with peppers and onions and two cloves of chopped garlic, and set it aside so that they were ready to add to the pizza. While the pizza was cooking on the stove top, I got my toppings ready. The dough didn't bubble with the sauce on it while it was cooking on the stove. Thank you Pizza God...

Once the crust was done on the stove top, I added some mozzarella cheese

Then the toppings

and more cheese

At this point I added some oregano and basil, but you don't see it because the photo was too blurry to add. I placed the skillet into the 500 degree oven, which you won't see either because the photo didn't turn out. (I promise that I will take better photos in the future. I promise to take better photos in the future). I cooked the pie for fifteen minutes and pulled it out when it was done. Oh, and remember to use hot pads when taking the skillet out of the oven, or you will be dancing around in the kitchen screaming and waving your hands in the air while trying to catch your pizza and teaching everyone present your new vocabulary...

Here's what it looked like when I first took it out of the oven. (notice the hot pads)?

Here is a shot of the pizza from a different angle...see, already I'm learning.

The pizza slid easily out of the pan and onto the cutting board. As you can see, the bottom of the crust was perfectly done. Notice the char...

Growing up in New York I was a die hard thin crust pizza eater. I would take the slice and fold it in my hand and eat it like a New Yorker... (if you didn't fold, they knew that you were from Kansas) I thought everyone made thin crust and folded their slice,until Grandma showed me what a Sicilian pizza looked and tasted like. It had a thicker crust with a home made crushed tomato sauce. Since that day, all of my pies have a thick and airy crust, which is slightly charred, and has a crisp outer layer, but inside it's airy and light. It's sweet, salty, full flavored but not greasy, and I make my own hand crushed tomato sauce.

The end result

I'm glad that I didn't buy the wood fire pizza oven.

If you haven't tried this way of making pizza, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. One more thing, a cast iron skillet is a must to have for all kinds of food. Make sure that it's seasoned and food will not stick to it. You can buy them new, or check out garage sales. You will be amazed at the results. 

Anyone care to buy unused pizza equipment...?

                                                                                              Don Joseph Clementi, Pizzaiolo