How to Make Grandma Pizza

How To Make Grandma Pizza

Making Grandma Pizza is easy In this video, I will show you my version of how to make Grandma Pizza. My inspiration was the local bakeries of Brooklyn that would make big sheet pans of this style of pizza when I was a young boy. I must admit though that my Grandma never made pizza, but she was an amazing cook that prepared incredible Italian meals that could have fed an army. So The name itself is a nod to simple home-style preparation: baked in a pan, without the benefit of a pizza stone or some other fancy implement. “That’s what Italian grandmothers would make at home, the pizza of the house, the pizza à la Nonna,” says noted NYC pizza expert Scott Wiener of https://www.scottspizzatours.com/​ ( My Buddy!) But the grandma pizza was not only for grandmas. The local bakeries and pizza places of Brooklyn would make big sheet pans of this style of pizza when I was a young boy that was just amazing. There’s nothing quite like a thin-crust slice of pizza. … Grandma pie is a square or rectangular pizza that has been cooked in an olive oil-coated pan. It’s covered in a thin layer of mozzarella cheese, and in uncooked canned or fresh tomatoes, and when it comes out of the oven, the thin crust is crispy! The crispiness is from an oil-covered pan some coat the pan with olive oil and others with Crisco oil. You can make the Grandma in a home oven as well. You can also put whatever you like on top of your pizza!

Cooking Tips

The dough recipe that I use It’s quite simple, no need to stress. If you’re making the dough let it sit in the relegation for 24 hours min and up to 72 hours. The longer it sits the better the flavor of the dough. You can even go to a local pizza shop and purchase dough if they have 20 oz large doughs or smaller dough you can combine them together on top of each other to get at least a 25 oz dough if it’s bigger than that the crust will be thicker.

The Dough Recipe

Flour – 30. oz all-purpose or High Gluten
Semolina # 1 – 5 oz If you don’t have semolina use more flour
Water 20 oz weight
Salt 21 grams,
Olive oil 14 grams yeast
2.5 Fresh Yeast Mix well by hand or with a mixer until dough is developed and smooth.
This will make 2 doughs for a 16×16 inch pan.

The Sauce ! 40 oz of Plumb Tomatoes (with Juice) Hand Crushed Or Milled. Use (2) 28 oz cans (save the rest or put the plums on the grandma pizza)
1 oz olive oil extra virgin
2 cloves of garlic chopped fine
1 tsp sea salt
6 basil leaves chopped well
Combine with crushed tomatoes That’s The Sauce! Don’t Cook!
Other Ingredients: Chopped Fresh Basil for topping the pizza and Pecorino Romano and toppings you like and That is How To Make Grandam Pizza! Love Life And Get Cooking

Video Transcription

Speaker 1:All right, guys, how we doing today? Today I have something really cool for you. I’m going to do a grandma pizza, and a grandma pizza is a great pizza. It’s going to be cooked in a square tray. Yeah, right? This is a black iron tray. And it reminds me of growing up in Brooklyn when all the little bakeries used to make different styles of pizza, grandma pizza, they called it. And they made big sheet pans, and it was absolutely incredible. And it’s one of my favorite pizzas. It’s really easy. You can feed the family. It’s simple to do in a wood-fired oven or even in a home oven. So check it out, and here we go.

All right, so here’s what we’re going to need today to start. We’re going to take one of our square pans. We’re going to have it nice and oiled. We’re going to use a 25-ounce dough ball. Okay? Then we’re going to stretch it out into the pan. We have some fresh tomatoes, milled with a little basil, so this is our sauce. We’re going to be using fresh mozzarella. It’s really nice. I sliced it not too thick and not too thin because if it’s real thin, it will burn. If it’s too thick, it won’t cook. I have some chopped basil for garnish at the end. I’m also going to use a little bit of shredded cheese. I like to make the pizza really creamy with the cheese blend, some dried oregano that we grew here at home. And I think that’s going to cover all. Oh, a little pecorino, a little Parmesan, whatever you have, to finish at the end. Okay?

So the first thing we’re going is we’re going to take this big dough, and we’re going to stretch it out. Now, it depends on how you make your dough, but this is a 25-ounce dough ball, and you really want to get it stretched out to fill the whole pan. If your dough is tight, it might take a little bit of work, but you can let it relax for a while and then do it again because your pan is oiled, so the dough has a tendency to snap back. So if your dough is nice and loose, it’ll work, and you can just go around. You want to go on nice and level. Right? Or dough is nice and airy. It’s soft and really good. So you can pick it up a little bit at the same time, but you don’t want to overstretch it. You’re just going to work that dough. Pick it up, put it back down. You see how it slides back? That’s because it’s all oiled.

All right. So you’re just going to keep working it like this. Pick it up again. Pick it up again. Push it all the way to the corners. And what I like to do is just let it relax a few more minutes, and then I work it again. It becomes easier to stretch. You can also take it and hold it on the edges like this. You see it’s pulling back. That’s okay. I’m just going to give it a little help. We can hold it up there. There you go. Press it down so it stays. And we’re going to work it into the corners. Hold it over here, nice. You’re just going to keep working it until your dough is absolutely beautiful.

Now, this is a thin and crispy and crunchy kind of a pizza. And here comes our nosy body over here. He’s always in. Hello, [Coopey 00:03:28]. Okay, and we’re just going to let it sit now for a few minutes and relax. Come on, go sit. Go inside. Thank you. And then we’re good to go. See?

Once you fill the whole pan up and your dough starts to relax, I like to take a little bit of foil and cover my dough. And then, because you’re pressing out some of the air while you do this, so I like to let it rise again and let the yeast start activating. So if you can let it rise in your home, just cover it up like this. Put some foil on it and let it sit for another two hours, and I’ll show you what happens.

So here’s the first one. We’re covering it up, relaxing, and we can always push it back. If you have to recover it, it’s fine. And then I’ll take it like this to save time. Now we can see how active that yeast got. I let this sit out for about two hours in a really warm … on top of my store while I was cooking. So it’s really nice and bubbly, and this is going to make a beautiful pizza. And you can smell, mm, that yeast. It’s really good.

So once it’s like this, we’re ready to give it a nice little coating. All right? We don’t want to put a lot of sauce. We just want to keep it moist and keep it down while it’s going to cook. We’re going to pre-cook it. Okay? Just like that, coat this up really nice. And this is crushed tomatoes, a little bit of basil, garlic, sea salt, and a little bit of olive oil. It’s just a really nice Italian plum tomato sauce. It’s very simple. It’s just milled, and it looks great.

And this is where I like my oregano. I like the fresh oregano. It’s not as pungent. It’s more sweet. I just put a little bit on there, and then I’m going to go into the oven with this and let it bake. Okay? The secret is that once it’s ready, you want to put it in the oven. You want to let it bake so the bottom is brown. But you have to cover it for the first 10 minutes, and then we’re going to put our cheese and everything else on top. So this is a great pizza. You can feed the whole family. Have your foil, and don’t press it too tight on the pizza. You don’t want it to stick, and it might stick a little bit, but that’s okay. And that’s it. Then we’re going to throw this in the oven. And again, you can even throw your home over. Doesn’t matter. All right.

You’re going to throw the pie in the oven. We’re going to make sure that the oven is nice and hot. And we’re going to let this bake for about, I would say, about 12 minutes to get the bottom nice and golden. Place it in there, and we’re going to make sure that we actually turn this around every three minutes or so. Okay? Because you get different spots of hot and cold, so you want to make sure that you get a nice, beautiful, even bake. All right? Just keep turning it every couple of minutes to get an even bake on the other side. Now, it’s always good to check your floor, that you’re nice and hot. We’re up in the 600 range, 650, so we know the oven’s hot. And, of course, the domes are going to go very high. And the wood fire near that’s going to be 800 near the dome. So that’s good. All right.

Don’t forget to keep spinning. That’s it. This has been about 10 minutes. I just want to check it out. Now, I kept turning it, and I want to check the bottom. All right? It’s hot, so be careful. And like I said, this might stick a little bit to it, but that’s okay. See the bottom? You want to get a little more color than that, a little more brown. Almost done. In another three minutes, I think we’ll be perfect.

All right. So we’ve been cooking about 13 minutes now, and I would say it’s just about ready, so I’m going to take one last peek. The is dying down, which is great because we don’t want to burn the top of this pizza. We’ve still got to give it a good bake, so you want to time that. Get your oven hot. Let your fire died down. Check your bottom. Let’s take a look at what we got here. Oh yeah, nice color, nice and crispy nooks and crannies. Look at that. That’s looking good. So we’re going to take this guy out, and don’t burn yourself. Be careful. And we’re going to go right to our table to work on.

And let’s see. Hopefully, we get a nice clean … it might stick a little bit, but that’s okay. Be careful when you take off the top. All right. It looks really good. I could smell a little bit of a hint of oregano, and the tomatoes, and the basil. You want to peel it nice and carefully.

All right. Now we’re going to put on some fresh mozzarella. That looks really good. We’re going to put a straight line right down across the center, making it look good as you go. Put some more over here. Looks good. And we’ll put a little more over here. And you’re just basically making lines and rows of fresh cheese. And then we’re going to put the sauce in between each one because you to make sure you make it look nice. And just get in a little more. Get that going. Put these over here. That looks good. All right, put that in.

Then we’re going to take our fresh sauce, and we’re going to lay it in really nice and simple. Okay? Bring it all the way down. Don’t put too much, just enough to make sure you’re covering it all, making it look good. And when this thing bakes, it’s going to be absolutely beautiful. Okay, so we’ll put that in there and put that over here. A little more just like so, there we go. A little more, and a little more at the edge. Cover up any spots. This way, you don’t have the burning or not looking good. See, on the edges, it’s good to put a little bit to keep it nice. Beautiful. All right. That’s how to rock the grandma pizza.

Then we’re going to put a little shredded cheese in there. Keeps it creamy when you do that and really makes it nice because sometimes the fresh mozzarella can burn a little bit. So a little shredded cheese on top will make it really creamy and nice, so just put a little bit. Don’t go too much. Cover it nice and simple. Okay, a little more here and a little more down the row. There we go. Looking good.

We have our gloves, and we’re going to go back into the oven. Really nice. And then we’re going to finish this with fresh basil and Reggiano. Okay? So here we go. Moving, and that looks great. You can see the combination of fresh and shredded cheese, and that pie is going to be absolutely beautiful.

I’m going to take it over here now. Okay, this is going to be super crunchy. Let’s take a look at the dough on the bottom. It’s very, very crunchy. You can hear it cracking as you lift it. This pie has a little pecorino all over it, Parmesan cheese. The better the cheese, the more flavor. Okay, that’s a grandma, and that’s the way they do it. Then it gets a lot of fresh chopped basil just like that. Okay. It looks really beautiful, actually. That’s the way we roll on a Sunday afternoon.

And now I’ve got to feed the family something absolutely incredible. I’m going to make a nice cut. And listen up. You can hear that crunch. This makes a super crunchy, amazing pizza, and we’re going to have nine beautiful slices so we feed the family something good. The best part of it is not just cooking it. It’s just, you’re going to be eating it. Let’s take a look at that. Wow. All right, nice and crunchy. Look at that beautiful pizza.

Everyone’s going to get a nice slice of that and absolutely love it. You can see how nice it’s cooked. Now, look at the edges here. You can see all the little bubbles, and you know your dough has cooked beautifully. Take a look at the bottom. All right? That’s just a beautiful, beautiful pizza. So love life, and get cooking, guys. Mm, absolutely amazing. Love it.