The Cheesiest, Crispiest Pizza is Also the Easiest | What’s Eating Dan?

I'm Dan Souza and I learned to read because of Pizza Hut. Now check this out. In the 80s and 90s, Pizza Hut had a program called Book It. Now if you did Book It, I just unlocked some serious nostalgia for you. They set up this program where if you read enough books each month, you got a free personal pan pizza. It was genius. My sister and I would have reading competitions, which I guess in retrospect were more like, how many free pizzas can we get competitions? A gooey, cheesy, crispy bottom deep dish pizza got a generation of kids to read. That's power. Today, I'm giving you all the cheat code to that pizza. You don't have to read a thing. Let's take a closer look at what makes pan pizza so incredibly delicious. Starting from the top, you've got all of that molten, bubbly brown cheese, followed by a layer of bright tasting red sauce. Below that, the crumb is thick and sturdy, but also pillowy and plush, like a really comfy mattress. Not one of those online mattresses that comes rolled up in a box, more like a hotel mattress, the kind that makes you hate your mattress when you get back home. That contrast between the tender, airy interior and the deeply golden fried to a crisp crust is one feature that really sets pan pizza apart from the other styles. The other is the two different cheese experiences, a crispy, jagged ring around the perimeter that I like to call the cheese wall and the gooey, bubbly mozzarella that melts across the top. Okay, so pizza didn't quite have that cheese wall, but it should have, and this one definitely does. Now, basically, all I really want to talk about is that cheese, but we're going to kick things off with the dough. A lot of what we know about bread and pizza dough is almost taken as gospel. You have to knead it for a really long time to build up gluten, the protein structure that gives bread and pizza their great, chewy texture, and then you have to stretch it and shape it just so before it's ready to bake. But if you start questioning what all that kneading, stretching, and shaping is actually doing for the dough, you'll realize that you can break some of those rules and still get the same great results. About 20 years ago, Jim Leahy, owner of Sullivan Street Bakery, blew up the baking world with his no-knead bread method. He showed us that you could skip traditional kneading if you simply added enough water and let the dough sit long enough. Cook's Illustrated senior editor, Lan Lam, uses a nearly no-knead technique for this stellar dough. So let's hit the kitchen and see how it works. I'm stirring together 11 ounces of bread flour, one teaspoon of salt, and one teaspoon of yeast. Now in goes one cup of warm water, and I just mix until most of the flour is moistened. Then I just knead it for about a minute into a sticky ball. This is so easy my cat could do it. We're using bread flour because it contains elevated amounts of glutenin and gliadin, two proteins that come together in the presence of water to form gluten. And we're using warm water to jumpstart the yeast activity so that lots of air bubbles develop quickly. Fun fact, when you knead dough in a stand mixer, the friction naturally warms up the dough. That's not happening here, so we need a little warm water to help things along. Let's talk more about that water. The amount of water in a dough is known as the hydration percentage. It is the ratio of water to flour in the recipe. Now to calculate it, you divide the weight of the water by the weight of the flour, and then multiply by 100. For a super simple example, if we had 200 grams of water and 300 grams of flour, that's 200 divided by 300 times 100, and the dough is 67% hydration. Got it? Okay sweet. The hydration of Lon's pan pizza dough is about 73%, which is moderately high. Higher hydration generally leads to a more open crumb, meaning larger air bubbles. And that's because water expands by a factor of 1700 when it becomes steam. Check out this quick sidebar. Low hydration doughs, which typically range from 50 to 60%, are relatively dry and stiff like this, and they produce a tight even crumb like you'd find in sandwich breads and bagels. In the middle are doughs for things like thin crust pizza, which run from about 65 to 75%, and bake up with ample chew and a relatively open structure. And high hydration doughs like this focaccia range all the way up to 90% hydration. They're wet, sticky, and even batter-like, resulting in an open crumb with large irregular air bubbles and a light airy texture. How you ask? If the dough has enough time to rest, say at least 12 hours, the water actually facilitates gluten development by playing this sort of matchmaker type role between the proteins glutenin and gliadin. Water gives one of the proteins, gliadin, its extensibility, and glutenin, the other protein, its elasticity, when water molecules bond to them and create what we call the gluten matrix. Let me put it a different way. It's like searching for someone in a crowd, and then some magical force comes along to help you move around in the mob and eventually connect, fall in love, and then tie the knot. It's pretty cool. And when they do link up, the proteins form tight bonds that make the crumb strong and chewy. Bread people call this passive gluten development, and it's a beautiful thing for making all sorts of yeasted baked goods with practically no hands-on work. One more plug for letting the dough sit in the fridge for a long time. The pizza is going to taste better. That's because the yeast activity slows down when it's cold, which gives it more time to develop complex flavors. How does that work? One major factor is that yeast reproduces more given the longer time, which means there are exponentially more yeast cells and therefore more of the deliciousness they create in a refrigerated dough than in a short fermented dough. And here is our dough after the first proof. You'll notice it's not sticky anymore because that free water that was making it sticky is now bound up to those proteins, and it's puffed up a bit with some nice gas production. Check them out side by side. The only difference? Time. After warming up at room temperature for a bit, we'll transfer our dough to a well-oiled cast iron skillet. And I do mean well-oiled. Three tablespoons of oil, which will fry the crust like a chip during baking. Oh man, I'm getting so excited just thinking about that. A cast iron skillet is the perfect pan for the job. Even better than the baking pan that Pizza Hut pizzas come in, if you ask me. And that's because we can move it from the oven to the stove after baking to crisp up the underside of the crust even more. And I'd always choose cast iron over stainless steel or even carbon steel pans here because its sides are taller and straighter, which supports the lofty dough as it bakes. And finally, it soaks up and retains heat exceptionally well for better browning. Okay, I promise we're getting to the cheese in just a sec, but let's talk about the sauce real quick because it's the easiest part of this super easy recipe. It's this thick, no-cook beauty made with just drained whole tomatoes, processed with olive oil, garlic, and a couple of other seasonings. Okay, now for the moment you've all been waiting for, the cheese. Man, I've been waiting for this too because unlike most pizzas, this style is at least as much about the cheese as it is the crust. To build the cheese wall, we sprinkle about a cup of shredded Monterey Jack around the rim of the dough and then press it half an inch or so up the side of the pan. You want to really press it into the pan. Monterey Jack is what you want here because it's a bit drier than mozzarella, which means it can brown even more deeply. Then we load up, and I mean load up, the center of the pizza with shredded low-moisture mozzarella to the tune of two cups. Between the top and the rim, there's almost three-quarters of a pound of melty, crispy cheese on this baby, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Before we bake this thing, let's have a quick chat about toppings. Now, if you're going to add vegetables like mushrooms or peppers, do yourself a favor and zap the sliced pieces in the microwave for a minute or so first. Check it out. They soften and shed a good bit of moisture. That's moisture you definitely don't want sogging out Then, be sure to begin and end with cheese, which acts like glue to keep everything in place. Now, we're just going to slide the pan onto the bottom rack of a preheated 400-degree oven. That bottom rack placement just above the oven's heat source puts as much distance as possible between the top of the pie and the heat radiating off of the oven ceiling. That way, the crust has time to crisp before the mozzarella browns. Okay, let's pull this beauty out. Now, it looks perfect on top, but the bottom isn't quite as crisp as I want, which is no problem. We'll just pop this over the heat on the stovetop and fry until the bottom is deeply browned and crisp. How fun is that? You know, I'm actually realizing that the only hard part of this recipe is that you have to let it cool for 10 minutes before serving. It's so tempting to just dive in because it looks and smells incredible, but if you can hold off, the crust and the frico, that crispy cheese wall, will actually be crisper and you'll get cleaner slices because the slightly cooled mozzarella won't be quite so oozy. Not to mention, you'll avoid burning your mouth. All right, that's it. I'm going for it. This is so good. There's so much going on in every bite. The tender airy crumb surrounded by the crunchy olive oil fried crust and that crispy cheese, the bright tomato sauce and her gobs of melty mozzarella. This is unbelievable. I need another bite. This is definitely how to eat pan pizza. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Pizza for being so good it turned a generation of kids into readers. And thanks to Lon Lamb for bringing back this childhood classic. Now leave a comment below and tell me what toppings you're adding to your pie. And also, did you do book it? I need to hear about it. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.