I've always wanted to make great pizza at home.
Sure, it's one of those dishes that restaurants usually make better than home cooks. And that's part of the draw. There's something irresistibly alluring about the prospect of recreating pizza without the aid of expensive special equipment (say, a $30,000 pizza oven hand-crafted in Naples). Or even a copper pizza stone to bake your pie on.
And over the years, I've tried dozens of hacks and tips for making pizza in my own kitchen. Just turn your oven up as high as humanly possible and things will work out ok. Don't forget to pre-bake your pie for a few minutes, take it out of the oven for toppings, and finish it off. And on and on.
And while years of homemade pizza experience and a great oven usually do translate to a better pie (they sure as hell don't make things worse). Sadly, and I'm only speaking from personal experience here, pizza is often an abject failure at home. And, for a long time, I just accepted that fact. "It's a fool's errand," I said to myself, standing in my kitchen amid a cloud of flour and a sticky mess of bad dough.
All that changed when I tried my very first grandma-style pizza: I became an at-home pizza believer.
If you've eaten at any standard, small-town pizza parlor that's the carb-laden equivalent of a dive bar, you've probably come into contact with the grandma pizza. It's a rectangular pie that gets baked in a sheet pan, resulting in crispy edges and a crust with a good amount of chew. It's a delicious vehicle for just about any combination of topping and the sort of thing that reminds me of being a kid, enjoying piece after piece of what's really a big, slightly greasy piece of bread. Which is to say it's awesome.
And even better, it's bone-headed-ly easy to make at home. Grandma pie is basically the crock pot of home pizza making.
There's no need to fuss with the dough, tossing it high in the air all in the name of getting it to fit neatly on a pizza stone. With the grandma pie, you plop your dough on the center of a sheet tray and stretch it out so it covers the whole thing.
The rest is this simple: The dough requires about 30 minutes to prepare and an overnight rise in a sheet tray. From there, the dough gets topped with what ever you want -- mozzarella, arugula, prosciutto, soppressata, kale, etc -- and baked in the oven for 20 to 30 minutes.
No gimmicks, no fancy equipment, no compromises. Just great pizza that you made at home.
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