I’ve been trying to distract my brain from some of the craziness going on in the world which led me to spend some time building an online tool that can help you create a great pan pizza no matter which size or shape baking pan or oven-proof skillet that you might have. You simply enter the dimensions of the bottom inside of your pan and the tool will generate the gram weight (and volume) of all of the dough ingredients, and it will even attempt to show you how much sauce, cheese, and toppings (in this case, pepperoni) you might need.
Note: I’m not the first person to build an online pizza calculator, but I happen to be the person who built an online pizza calculator on the website that you’re currently viewing. Don’t forget to bookmark and share with all your pizza friends.
Here’s a link to the pan pizza calculator tool I’m writing about because I know that some of you don’t want to read a lot of words, but please come back and read because there are some helpful tips in this post.
Is this a Detroit-style pizza?
Sort of. Mostly. I’m not trying to put labels on this particular pizza tool or recipe because I wrote the recipe to be used with round and square pans, different types of cheeses, and different tactics for spreading the sauce. I also have not traveled to Detroit to experience the birthplace of Detroit-style pizza so I’m just being safe and calling this “pan pizza.” It’s very similar and adjacent to Detroit-style and if you do it right, it’ll likely be pretty close to what you might get in the Motor City.
Given all of this, we’ll keep calling this a good old pan pizza.
If you’ve never had pan pizza or Detroit-style pizza, you’ll be in for a treat. The dough in this type of pizza is not thin and it’s baked in a pan on top of oil which ends up lightly frying up the bottom and leaving it with a crispy and almost buttery flavor and a sharp crunch that balances well with the light airy dough. The cheese on this type of pizza is intentionally spread to the edge of the pan so it caramelizes and helps the top exterior retain a nice crunch.
If you’ve not read much from my blog, you might not know that I’ve also built an online Focaccia Calculator which you can find below. The dough and baking process in focaccia is fairly similar to the dough and process used to make a pan pizza, so that’s where I started my testing.
Focaccia pan calculator
This tool will build an ingredient list to help you create a focaccia to fit the size of the pan that you want to use. Enter the shape and size of your pan and the Focaccia Calculator will do the rest.
Now that we know what we’re doing today, let’s talk about the ingredients and then the tools.
Pan pizza dough
This is a no-knead recipe that’s about 80% hydration. The recipe produces a dough that is quite sticky but the way you handle it should be easy because of the amount of oil that is spread throughout the pan. When you first build the dough, you start with a spoon and stir until the dough comes together and there are no dry, spots or visible flour. There’s no need to knead at this point, but it is helpful if you continue to stir the wet dough for 2 or 3 minutes just to make sure it’s all nicely combined.
The 80% hydration part of the dough means that the amount of water divided by the amount of flour equals 80%. Or to put it a slightly less “mathy” the water is almost exactly 80% of the weight of the flour used in the dough. This means it will be a wet dough which translates to the dough being very sticky and potentially hard to manipulate with your hands. That’s why the first part of this recipe requires stirring with a spoon and the later parts of the recipe where you are working with the dough, typically take place in a very well-oiled pan which will get on your fingertips to ensure the dough sticks very little to your hands.
This pizza recipe takes about 3 hours from start to finish but much of that time is hands-off. You have to stir at the beginning. After an hour of rise time you have to move the dough to the pan of your choosing and then after another hour of dough rising you have to decorate the pizza and toss it in the oven for 20 to 25 minutes. Then I would highly suggest a few minutes of allowing the pizza to cool on a wire rack before slicing.
Sauce and toppings
You can use whatever sauce and toppings you want, but these are my suggestions and my recipe uses calculations to come up with an approximation of the amount of sauce, cheese, and toppings needed to complete the recipe based on the size of your pan.
Pizza sauce
As I said, you can use whatever sauce you like in this recipe. I typically use the sauce recipe that my wife has been making for a few years now. Her recipe is just below, but I do not include it in the full Pan pizza calculator recipe because I want this to be your pizza and you can sauce it however you please. The recipe does attempt to give you a rough guess as to how much pizza sauce you will need depending on the size pan you are using, but again you can just buy a jar off the shelf or use grandma’s recipe if that’s what you like.
Use this recipe if you need a fairly easy and tasty pizza sauce. It’s on the sweeter side with a bit of spice, just how we like it in my house.
Robin's pizza sauce
A slightly spicy, slightly sweet tomato sauce that's great for your next thin crust, thick crust, or even French bread-style pizza.
Get RecipeCheese
True Detroit-style pizza uses brick cheese. If you’ve never heard of it, brick cheese is a type of cheese that originated in Wisconsin in the late 1800s. It’s similar to cheddar with a higher fat content and it has a very mild taste, more akin to the flavor of low-moisture mozzarella. When brick cheese is young and hasn’t been aged, it’s a very good melting cheese and in the case of Detroit-style pizza, it caramelizes against a hot pan very well, which is why you see those really dark edges on this type of pizza.
Brick cheese isn’t always easy to find, in fact, I’m starting to struggle to find it at my local stores where it used to be readily available. So you, and I, might need a substitute.
Instead of brick cheese, I’ve been using a combination of low-moisture mozzarella and Monterey Jack. I go for about 50/50 but I also have made this same style of cheese with just a low-moisture mozzarella and it works fine all by itself too. My favorite blend though is the 50/50 Monterey Jack and low-moisture mozzarella. It’s easy for me to find and it does the trick with making the pizza nice and cheesy and building a crispy, crusty edge.
You can shred these cheeses or you can cut them into 1/4-inch cubes, whichever one you find easiest. I typically cut the cheese into small pieces because it’s easier to clean a knife than to deal with a cheese grater.
When you are spreading the cheese on the pizza it is extremely important to make sure the cheese gets all the way to the edges. The cheese at the edges of the pan will melt and drip down between the dough and the pan and it will caramelize. If you do it right, your finished pizza should have a fairly dark strip around the edges where the cheese turns crispy against the pan. This dark cheese will not taste burnt and this isn’t a flaw. It’s all part of the plan. Trust me.
Toppings
For the main pan pizza calculator recipe below I used pepperoni since it’s the most popular topping choice in the United States at the moment. It’s also pretty tasty. But as with the sauce and the cheese, you’re free to use whatever toppings you enjoy the most.
As you’ll see as you scroll through all the testing pizzas I made this month you’ll see that I used a whole different variety of ingredients, mostly because they’re what I had available.
I typically slice my own pepperoni because I like to buy Boar’s Head natural casing pepperoni when I can find it. If you’ve never bought that before, it simply means that the sausage is encased in an edible casing which when sliced and baked it will help the pepperoni to cup up. This part is purely for looks, but the pepperoni is also really tasty.
I also provided a weight option for the pepperoni that you can use as a guide but just like the cheese and sauce, add as much as you like. In the instructions for the main pan pizza recipe, I also mention that I like to take 1/4 of the allotted pepperoni and place it under the cheese, while the other 3/4 goes on top of the cheese. I would also suggest this topping strategy with any other meat toppings because it forces some of the grease extruding from the meat to seep into the dough below, where otherwise the layer of cheese might block it.
Tools
Most of these tools are optional. The first one, however, is not.
A Pan
This is pan pizza. You need a pan. You can use baking pans and you can use oven-safe skillets like a cast iron pan. I find that the darker pans work a bit better in creating an environment to brown and crisp up the bottom of the pizza but a lighter-colored pan will work. I have not tried Pyrex baking dishes (a friend asked about this during the testing period), but in theory, a pan pizza in Pyrex would cook through and the top should cook properly, I just can’t vouch for how well the bottom will color or crisp up.
Choose a pan that’s set for oven baking and let’s get to work. We’re going to make a good pizza! But before we get off to a start, you need to make sure you’ve measured your pan properly because it could mess up the calculation.
Very Important pan size detail
*INSERT FLASHING STROBE LIGHTS HERE*
Measure the bottom of the pan. This pan pizza calculator uses *MATH* to figure out the area of the inside bottom of your pan. This means if you have a sloped pan like the one in the photo below, it’s very important to measure the bottom of the pan and do not just accept what is claimed on the box or online listing for the pan.
For example, the pan below is a Lloyd Pans Detroit-style pan that is sold as a 10 x 14-inch pan. This is true—the pan dimensions are 10 x 14 inches AT THE TOP. But if you actually measure the bottom you’ll find this 10 x 14-inch pan has dimensions of 8.75 x 12.5-inches. If you plug in the 10 x 14-inch dimensions into my tool you will get a much thicker dough than is needed for this pan because this calculator is calculating the internal area of the pan. The pizza will still taste good and the dough will still be light but it will be thicker than the recipe intends.
I made this mistake once and I regret it still to this day.
Below are some of the baking pans I used in testing this calculator (not counting the cast iron pans).
You can use pretty much any oven-safe baking pan to make pan pizza, but I want to talk about two non-traditional baking pans briefly because they are both really good at this task.
Cast iron pan
A cast iron pan can make a stellar pan pizza. You actually have a bit more control over the crispness of the pizza bottom with cast iron because you can (and I suggest you do) cook the pizza a bit longer over the eye of the stove after it comes out of the oven.
When I bake a pan pizza in a cast iron skillet I will bake it until the top looks done to my liking and then remove the pan. I carefully loosen all the crispy edges from the skillet and peek underneath to check the browning on the bottom. If it isn’t brown enough (and it’s almost never brown enough in my experience) I will immediately place the pan over medium-high heat for 2 minutes. Then I remove the pan and check the bottom again. This usually does the trick for me, but you might need another minute or two.
Note that a cast iron skillet does have some angle at the bottom. If you want to make sure you’re using the right measurements for your pan make sure you measure the bottom to get the proper diameter to use in the pan pizza calculator.
Lloyd pans
Lloyd Pans makes really good pans for pan pizza. I own the 10 x 14-inch Detroit-style pizza pan. They are angled though which is no big deal when we know we need to measure and get our pan dimensions from the bottom of the pan. They come out of the box with a non-typical non-stick coating which makes it easy to get the pizza in and out of the pan.
Even though there is quite a bit of slope to the sides of these pans, as you’ll note in this photo, the resulting slice of pizza does not really have a whole lot of angle to it.
None of the rest of these tools are required but they do help out in this pan pizza process.
A scale
If you ever plan to bake anything, buy a scale.
A kitchen scale is a fairly inexpensive tool that will help you with more than just bread recipes and pizza recipes. It’s also just easy to keep in the kitchen for those times when you need to get precise and weigh something.
I’ve shared the link to the kitchen scale that I like quite a few times and I’ve also mentioned that I like it enough that I bought one for my mom to make sure her kitchen is prepared for all of my future visits as well. It’s around 27 bucks and has so far lasted in my kitchen for 7 years of steady baking so hopefully it’ll be a good option for you as well.
This pan pizza calculator recipe doesn’t require a scale, but it’s way more accurate if you do have one and use it for this purpose. You’ve read this far, trust me.
Spatulas or turners
Many of the baking pans that I own have non-stick properties and I really don’t want to scratch those up. So I often use plastic turners or spatulas to dislodge the edges of these pizzas. All you need is a fairly sturdy plastic turner with a somewhat thin edge so you can scrape in between the pan and caramelized cheese. There’s enough oil in the pan that you won’t really have to worry about the bottom sticking, but some of the edges usually do in my experience.
If you’re using a circular cast iron skillet, I highly recommend doing this with an offset spatula as seen in this photo. This makes the separation process so much easier because you don’t need to worry about scratching anything.
Cooling rack
ABC: Always be cooling. Once the pizza is loosened from the pan, move it to a cooling rack as soon as you can. Just like I’ve covered many times when writing about sandwiches, if you put a hot piece of bread or dough directly on a cutting board, it will start to steam itself and soften the bottom crust.
Cooling racks are fairly inexpensive and provide a place for your pizza to cool while allowing airflow to pass between the cutting board and the crispy, almost fried bottom of the crust. Allow the pizza to cool for at least 5 minutes unless you hate the roof of your mouth and want it to die from lava-temperature cheese.
Don’t skip the cooling rack step.
Some of the pizzas I’ve made with this calculator
8×8 pepperoni pan pizza
This is pretty much the default pizza for this recipe calculator. This and the 9-inch cast iron skillet recipe are where I built the main dough, sauce, cheese, and pepperoni calculations. If you have one of these brownie pans in your cabinet, yank it out and it will make 4 to 6 slices of really good pizza which should make at least 2 people really happy.
Bigger pepperoni (Lloyd pans 10 x 14 Detroit-style pan)
This is a bigger version of the previous pizza. One tip I will recommend about pizzas with pepperoni (or any meat for this matter) is that meat shrinks when cooked. After learning this you should remember that if you don’t put a lot of pepperoni on a pizza it will never appear like a pizza with a lot of pepperoni.
Cover the top with more pepperoni than you might think because it will shrink and look like much less. Just look down at the two photos below of the same pizza to see what I mean.
Cheese and pepperoncini pan pizza (9-inch cast iron)
This was the first test pizza I made with the first version of the recipe. I made it for my wife and me for dinner and it was a little thick. This caused the first adjustment in the recipe.
It’s a good combination though, if you’re looking for a non-meat pizza option. Just toss a lot of cheese and some store-bought pickled pepperoncini on there and you’ve got a good time.
Barbecue chicken pan pizza (9-inch cast iron)
This was the second test pizza that my wife and I enjoyed with the adjustments to the dough thickness from the first outing. A barbecue chicken pizza is my wife’s favorite topping/ingredient experience so I figured we’d use that to change some flavors up a bit since I didn’t want to have the same pizza over and over and over.
This version got the dough proportion to a really good place where I think it stayed with just slight adjustments until the end of testing.
Gabagool, provolone, vinegar peppers (aka the Tony Soprano) pizza (9 x 13-inch brownie pan)
If you’ve been reading along, you’d know that I shared Tony Soprano’s sandwich last week and since I had leftover ingredients I put them to work in a pizza. This pizza is topped with capocollo, provolone cheese and some pickled peppers. It turned out pretty good, but you can see that sharp provolone on its own does not caramelize as well as Monterey Jack and/or mozzarella.
Sausage and pepperoncini (9-inch round cake pan)
This pizza turned out really good but if you’re shooting for this shape and size, I think it’s better if you can use a cast iron skillet because you’re a bit more flexible and able to crisp up the bottom of the pizza on the stove in a skillet. But if you have a good, round pan it will still turn out a great pizza.
Meat-lovers pan pizza (10 x 14-inch pan)
This was the last test pizza that I made and it was one of the best. It’s pepperoni, homemade pork sausage, and capocollo on top of Monterey Jack and mozzarella. This was the second pizza of this batch of test pizzas that I baked in the Lloyd Pans pan and from here on out, it will be my go-to for a pizza like this.
Here’s my online pan pizza calculator. If you give it a shot, send me a message and let me know how it turns out!
Pan pizza calculator
This tool will build an ingredient list to help you create a pan-style pizza to fit the size of the pan that you want to use. Enter the shape and size of your pan and the Pan Pizza Calculator will do the rest.
Check back next week
Next week we’ll be back to sandwiches. Or will we!? There’s no telling what I’m getting up to around these parts. Stick around and find out.
