Sheet Pan Pizza Recipe
A type of pizza with a thicker crust, this pan pizza recipe is great to make for parties or celebrations when you have a lot of guests.
It’s also arguably one of the easier types of pizza to make and is a delicious meal from scratch. You don’t have to worry about stretching it by hand into a perfect circle, stretching it too thin that it tears, or shoving it from a pizza peel to a pizza stone.
Since it’s more hands-off than a traditional-style pizza, it makes a great recipe for beginners. If you like a thicker crust or have a lot of mouths to feed, or just want to start learning how to make pizza, this pan pizza recipe is for you. I typically make a thinner-crust pizza like my New York Style Pizza recipe but when I’m in the mood for a pan pizza, it’s a total treat.
My Other Pizza Recipes
If you’re planning to make the dough from scratch, you can use my basic pizza dough recipe. It’s the only pizza dough I ever use. One of these grandma-style pan pizzas uses the whole batch of pizza dough from that recipe. For making dough from scratch, you can use a large mixing bowl or a stand mixer, there are instructions for both methods in that recipe.
Should You Use Homemade Or Store-Bought Dough?
If you’d rather purchase dough from the store or your favorite pizza place, you’ll need around 1090 grams or about 2.43 lbs. of dough per pizza. You can get away with less if you can only buy dough by the pound, but I recommend using at least 2 lbs.
Which Is Better: Jarred Or Homemade Pizza Sauce
The best pizza sauce to use is your favorite pizza sauce. If you’d rather make homemade since homemade is always better and you can adjust it to taste, you should try my homemade pizza sauce recipe. It’s easy enough to make from a can of tomato paste in a few minutes, doesn’t require any cooking before putting on the pizza, and the ingredients are basic enough that most home kitchens probably have them already. It sounds too easy to be good but it’s a great pizza sauce.
How To Speed Up Proofing Pizza Dough
One trick you can use to speed up the proofing process while waiting for the dough to rise is to add a heating pad under the sheet pan. This could shorten the time of waiting for the dough to rise from several hours to less than an hour. You could also heat up the oven for just a minute to make a warm environment inside for the dough to rise, or use an air fryer that has a dough-proofing function. Just cover the dough with another upside-down sheet pan so the top doesn’t dry out being exposed to the air.
At A Minimum, You’ll Need:
- Sheet Pans for proofing and baking the dough in. The ones I use are 13″ x 18″ pans.
- It’s helpful to have a Dough Docker to perforate the dough, but you can also just use a fork.
- A Rolling Pin to roll out the dough into a rectangle to fit the sheet pan.
- A pair of Tongs for rotating and removing the pizza from the oven.
- A pair of Oven Mitts rated to 550°F for safety.
But It’s Also Nice To Have:
A Rocker-Style Pizza Blade. This is the best pizza knife to have because it can easily cut pizza without dragging cheese or toppings with it. This is because when you use it to cut a pizza the blade comes down from above the pizza instead of from the side. This is what many pizza places use to cut pizzas.
A bench knife is great for scooping up ingredients from the cutting board and quickly clearing surfaces of crumbs, flour, or bits of food that didn’t make it into your pan. This one is stainless steel like mine, and even has a ruler along the edge which is very helpful when cutting things to specific sizes or rolling out dough to a certain thickness.
A cheese grater to grate cheese for the pizza. I recommend using block cheese for this recipe and shredding it yourself if possible. Block cheese has no additives or fillers like vegetable cellulose that negatively alter the texture and flavor of the pizza. I personally use this one, but I realize not everyone has a KitchenAid. If you do, I recommend checking out that attachment, it’s great.
How To Make A Sheet Pan Pizza
You can tell I make a lot of pizzas from the golden season on the sheet pan. That’s from oil cooking off at high temperatures, it doesn’t look nice but it’s essentially its own natural non-stick coating. When oil polymerizes and cooks off, it makes this type of seasoned coating on a pan. Alright! Let’s get started showing you how to make the best pan pizza!
If you’ve already made the basic pizza dough recipe and proofed the pizza dough in baggies overnight in the fridge, you can take them out and work with them while they’re still cold.
I find it’s actually a little easier to work with them cold when making a sheet pan pizza, the pizza dough is easier to roll out with a rolling pin. Carefully remove the dough from the baggies and sit them side-by-side like in the above photo on a lightly floured surface. Pinch together the sides that touch so the two doughs come together to make one.
Note: For a smaller pizza like the rectangle ones you can get from Pizza Hut, you could use a 6.5″ x 9.5″ sheet pan and follow the same process.
Dust the top with a little flour and spread it around with your hand to prevent the rolling pin from sticking when you use it, then roll it out with the rolling pin just a little wider and just a little taller, just enough to fit the sheet pan.
Place two tablespoons of oil in the sheet pan and spread it around, then transfer your dough to it. I generally use canola oil here for its more mild flavor and higher smoking point. I sprayed the top of the dough here with a little water to moisten the dough slightly, this absorbs the excess flour and prevents the dough from drying out as it rises.
Note: Use real oil here. This is what gives the bottom of the pizza a nice and crispy bottom like your favorite pan pizza chain.
Then use a fork or Dough Docker to perforate the dough. This will help to prevent large bubbles from forming in the middle when it bakes. You don’t have to get too crazy with the holes, it’s just to prevent large bubbles from forming.
Place another sheet pan or something similar over the dough to completely cover it while giving it room to rise. If you need to use plastic wrap, spray the plastic wrap first with non-stick spray so it doesn’t stick when you go to remove it. This will help prevent the dough from drying out as it rises in a warm spot in your kitchen over the next 1-3 hours.
After some time, your dough will have risen to have about doubled in height and should almost come to the top of the sheet pan. Now you can preheat the oven to 550°F while you add the sauce and cheese.
Note: At this stage, the dough will be very soft. If you press it hard enough, where you press will collapse that area of the dough. This is because the dough is filled with lots of little bubbles. This is also why you want to gently spread the sauce in the next step, so you don’t pop these bubbles.
When you add sauce, make sure the sauce doesn’t touch the edges of the pan. If it does, the sugars in the sauce can burn and it’s not a very pleasant flavor. It can also prevent the dough from rising at that area of the crust and create a river, so to speak, that cheese can flow over as it cooks.
For a regularly sauced pizza, you’ll want to add enough sauce so that you can’t see very much dough through the sauce like in the above image. This would be considered regular sauce. You can add extra or go lighter to your preference. I used my Zesty Pizza Sauce recipe here.
Note: While you’re adding sauce, be gentle. Spread it around like you’re icing a cake. You don’t want to smash the spoon into the dough to spread the sauce around. I’ve seen people do this, and it just deflates all the bubbles you just spent an hour making. If it deflates a little as you spread it, that’s okay, but don’t intentionally smash the spoon into the dough to spread the sauce. Use a light touch.
Grease or lightly spray nonstick cooking oil on the pan near the crust. This will help to prevent cheese from burning to the sides of the pan making it difficult to remove the pizza once it’s finished. To add cheese to the pizza, I always like to start on the edges and work my way around the crust so that the sauce is covered closest to the crust first, then fill in the center with cheese once that’s done.
At this point, add any other toppings that you’d like! If you do add additional toppings, you may have to cook it a few minutes longer than suggested until the cheese is nice and caramelized.
Note: If cheese still burns to the side of the pan, you can use a flat metal spatula or butter knife to wedge between the pizza and the pan and go around the pizza, separating or breaking the cheese that is keeping it stuck.
Bake the pizza uncovered for about 12-15 minutes at 550°F, placing the sheet pan directly on the oven’s middle rack. Once the cheese is golden brown and caramelized like above, you can remove it from the oven and cut it into 12 or 16 slices and enjoy!
What’s cooking?
Sheet Pan Pizza Recipe
Ingredients
- 2.4 lbs, 1090g, or a batch of Homemade Pizza Dough
- 3/4 to 1 1/2 cups of storebought or Homemade Pizza Sauce
- 8 oz mozzarella, shredded
- 4 oz Monterey jack, shredded
- 4 oz aged white cheddar, shredded
- 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
- toppings (optional)
Instructions
Dust a smooth surface with flour and place your pizza dough, then lightly dust the dough with flour.
Using a rolling pin, roll the dough into a rectangle just wide and tall enough to fit inside a 13″ x 18″ sheet pan. Add two tablespoons of oil to the sheet pan, spreading it around to cover. Then, transfer your dough to the sheet pan and perforate the dough with a fork or dough docker. Cover it with another upside-down sheet pan or oil-sprayed plastic wrap, then set aside and let rise until doubled in size or until the dough rises to the top of the sheet pan that it’s in.
Preheat the oven to 550°F. Gently pour your sauce on the dough and use a large serving spoon to carefully spread it around, leaving about .5″ of dough around the edges without sauce. Be careful not to press down or apply too much pressure with the spoon while you’re saucing, the dough is very soft.
Mix your cheeses together and sprinkle the cheese over the sauce, covering all edges first and then filling in the center. Add any other toppings to your preference.
Bake the pizza for 12-15 minutes at 550°F on the oven’s center rack until the cheese caramelizes and forms nice golden brown spots.
Slice into 12-16 slices and enjoy!
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