How To: Use a Cast Iron Skillet for Super Crispy Homemade Pizza

Traditional pizza ovens feature stone or brick floors, which retain heat and redistribute it evenly across the cooking surface. The intense and immediate heat from the preheated stone surface allows the dough to become crispy while maintaining a delightfully chewy texture.
     To replicate this at home, one could spend $2,000-13,000 and buy a proper wood burning pizza oven, il forno di pizza. A more popular route is to purchase a “baking stone” or “pizza stone”, a flat, rectangular or circular slab of ceramic designed for the home oven.
    Unfortunately, unless you purchase a top notch stone, which are about $70 dollars for a medium sized piece, these home stones heat unevenly, and they often break after a year or so, usually from steam. An inexpensive model cost around $20, but that’s still a bit too much for a product that will break every few years.

So one option is to grab a super inexpensive oven sized unglazed rock slab, and place it in the bottom of your oven. But don’t head to the quarry just yet, you may have everything you need in your kitchen already.

From Meg at Not Martha: “Maybe I don’t need a pizza stone after all. Last night we made pizza and since I really, really wanted to make sure the dough cooked all the way through (this time) I decided to cook it in our large cast iron skillet that had I heated in the oven and slid the pizza into to cook, around 450 degrees”

It’s what some dine-in pizza chains have done for decades. Try it at home.