Making pizza without an oven

Recreating that fabulous pizza from your favorite restaurant at home is complicated. For the perfect crust, you need a pizza stone and an oven that gets scorching hot. Don’t have those, but do have a cast-iron skillet? Then that’s what you’ll be making all your pizzas in from now on.

A cast-iron pan like that, skillet in English, can get incredibly hot, and that’s important for your precious pizza. This is how you get those delicious charred spots and perfect doneness that you also find at good pizzerias. And don’t worry, it definitely won’t burn. It can sometimes take a while for the pan to heat up, so heat it for a long time. And be careful: the handle gets hot.

Also, be sure to peek underneath with a spatula from time to time. Is it going too fast? Then turn the heat down a little, and vice versa. In some recipes, the pizza goes into the oven for a few more minutes to melt the cheese, but for this recipe from Serious Eats, you don’t need an oven at all.