Pan Pizza That’s Actually Made in a Pan

He’s at it again. Mark Bittman of the New York Times, who in cooperation with the Sullivan Street Bakery’s Jim Lahey set the world afire with no-knead bread last year (in fact almost a year ago to the day), has published another insta-bread recipe in this week’s Dining & Wine section. This time it’s no-oven pizza, and again it looks fairly interesting. Essentially it’s standard pizza dough fried in a pan on the stove top with toppings scattered over. Sort of the same idea as the grilled pizzas that have been so popular the last few years, adapted for the stovetop.

It makes a certain amount of sense, pan frying pizza dough, since really good thin crust demands (literally) blistering heat of the kind that a home oven simply can’t deliver. While I doubt the result is going to be what most of us think of as pizza (it’s bound to be rather oily and fritter-like), what they hey, I’ve been wrong before, I’ll give it a whirl.