Cast-Iron Skillet the Key to "Serious" Homemade Pizza

Earlier this month we pointed out a clever idea for using your cast-iron skillet to cook pizza. Today, The Atlantic goes in-depth on cast-iron pizza cooking, crowning it the "secret to serious pizza."

Writer and foodie Vaughn Tan tested various pizza-cooking methods to get the closest-to-restaurant-quality results possible. Here's what he found:

A cast-iron skillet and a broiler in combination are the easy secret to a light, airy, moist, chewy, crisp, lightly-charred pizza without an expensive wood-fired oven or a potentially-expensive experiment with your home oven's safety lock. This pizza will not be quite as good as something baked in under a minute in a roaring-hot pizza oven, but it comes awfully close, all things considered.

The full recipe Tan followed is available here, but the majority of his recipe details the finer points of the cooking process. For example, to prepare the skillet and the oven:

Turn on the broiler and preheat the dry, ungreased skillet on the stovetop on the highest setting for eight to 10 minutes. As soon as you begin heating the skillet, lightly flour a wood cutting board, or better yet a pizza peel.

It's an intense process, and not exactly something you can throw together in a few minutes (his suggested dough needs four to six days to mature), but if you're looking to make a great homemade pizza, it's worth a try.

The Cast-Iron Secret to Serious Pizza [The Atlantic]

Strange to see this posted at Lifehacker just after I used the technique to make Pebble Bread. I'm a believer.

Q. Tell me more about what you’re looking for.

A. I don’t think about interviewing them for work. I first try to understand who they are as people. I usually have someone’s résumé, but I never look at it until they sit down. Then I say, “O.K., take me through the résumé.”

The most important thing is people need to be themselves. And someone could be totally, on paper, perfect for the job. But they might not have the openness, the vision. I like when people bring energy, creativity, newness to me.

Q. What else?

A. Communicating. To me, this is probably the biggest thing. If it’s the right person, I can barely speak and they understand what I’m saying. But if it’s not the right person, they have trouble understanding, because creative people are not like other people. Any other creative C.E.O. will understand what I’m talking about.

Bobbi Brown, founder of Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, tells the New York Times what she looks for when interviewing job candidates.

The spread of multimedia communications and its rich “menu of options” might make us think it sufficient simply to be present on the Web, or to see it only as a space to be filled. Yet priests can rightly be expected to be present in the world of digital communications as faithful witnesses to the Gospel, exercising their proper role as leaders of communities which increasingly express themselves with the different “voices” provided by the digital marketplace. Priests are thus challenged to proclaim the Gospel by employing the latest generation of audiovisual resources (images, videos, animated features, blogs, websites) which, alongside traditional means, can open up broad new vistas for dialogue, evangelization and catechesis.

Don't know what the practical impact of this will be, but it's got to be a good sign. I mean, if the Pope says we've got to blog, how can we ignore it?

Just because it's Einstein's. I don't think it's so messy.