Finally: Fabulous Home Made Pizza

When Plotnik got home from Sicily, where every street has one or two shops making very good pizza, he vowed he would figure out a way to make great pizza at home, once and for all.

He researched expensive pizza ovens (it's cheaper just to fly to Naples a few times a year), he tried using the bbq outside (nice topping on incinerated cardboard) and he tried this fancy recipe and that brilliant routine, you know, the bricks, and the organic yadda yadda yadda. The result, invariably, was pizza that was just about as good as your average West Coast pizza, or frozen pizza, which is to say a lot of effort for not much payback.

Until he found his Lodge Cast Iron Pizza Pan.

With this (very heavy) beauty, you just preheat it in a 450 oven for twenty minutes or so, roll out the pizza dough on the side, then pat the dough into place in the hot pan and add the sauce and toppings. Put it back in the oven and in six to eight minutes you get this:

The gardens at Great Plotnik World Headquarters are full of broccoli rabe right now, so Plot picked a huge bunch and sauteed it with some Italian sausage. A simple uncooked tomato sauce, and the pizza dough recipe modified only slightly from the Smitten Kitchen cookbook (a gift from The Great BZWZ), mozzarella cheese and that sausage/broccoli rabe, and you end up with the best pizza we've had outside of Brooklyn.

No, we can't get that charred crust of Pizza Napolitan' without having a 900 degree brick oven, but who cares! Mmmm, this is really good stuff.

(The pizza on top is Thai basil with green Castelveltrano olives.)