Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Lodge Cast Iron Pizza Pan Reviewed at Serious Eats

Donna Currie has been posting a series of reviews of different pizza cooking surfaces. Today she posted her review of the Lodge Pro Logic Cast-Iron 14-Inch Pizza Pan. Co-blogger Rebecca gave me one for Hanukkah/Christmas/Solstice/Kwanzaa/New Year 2010. That's what I've been making all of my Pizza del Mese on. But Ms. Currie uses the pan in an unexpected way. She preheats the pan in the oven and then throws the prepared pizza upon it. So she complains that the pizza surface is small . . . because you have to throw your gooing pizza onto a flaming hot circle of iron. She also said she got some char on the underside of the pizza, which I've never experienced. I wonder if she'd have better success using it like I do, kinda following the description of how to cook a pizza using a pizza pan from Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough in Pizza: Grill It, Bake It, Love It! She did say

The crust was about as good as it gets.

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1 comments:

Rebecca said...

I have a traditional home kitchen pizza stone, which I like just fine. The directions for it say to heat the stone in the oven and then put the pizza on it. I do that, but I actually don't worry too much about getting it into the pan very quickly. That is, I stretch my dough, then place it on the stone. Then put the toppings on there. So, the dough starts cooking before I get the pizza back in the over, but it seems to work fine.

I started buying some premade pizza dough at the farmers market and their directions have you make the pizza on parchment (on a cookie sheet.) Once the pizza is ready to go, you slide the parchment onto the over rack (taking the cookie sheet out from under.) This seems to work well too and I don't have to deal with the mess of trying to scrape cheese of the pizza stone.

My general conclusion about making pizza at home is that if the dough is good and you like your choice of toppings, things will end up being tasty.