Summer Pizza

Several weeks ago, I was walking through an IKEA store and saw a shallow cast iron pizza pan. Rather than being simply a flat piece of metal, it had a low rim to prevent sautéd vegetables from going into the fire. It was relatively inexpensive and I thought this may be easier than building a pizza oven, so I purchased it. Maggie seasoned the cast iron, and this weekend we tried it out. We used pesto and vegetables from the garden for toppings, including peppers, summer squash, and onions.

One thing we immediately noticed was that people cooking pizza in a wood fired pizza oven on TV make it look way easier to transfer the pizza to the oven than we found in real life. I had bought a long-handled pizza peel at a rummage sale several years ago, but despite using oil and cornmeal, we could not slip the pizza off the peel and onto the cast iron pan. The first attempt, I just folded the pizza into a calzone, which made the transfer easier. For the next two, I placed the peel on the cast iron and closed the grill lid to get the pizza to cook a little, which firmed up the crust and allowed me to slide it off.

I also learned that it is possible to have the cast iron pan too hot. The second pizza burned slightly when I slid the pizza off onto the cast iron. I lowered the fire a little, and the third pizza came out better. We'll have to watch a few more YouTube videos and make a few more pizzas to perfect our technique.