I am the proud owner of a Lodge 10" Cast Iron Skillet. I bought it at the Lodge Factory Store in Tennessee for, like, $12 because of a small blemish. I’d heard about making pizza in a cast iron skillet, and tonight, I thought, why not? I largely used this guy’s recipe (minus the part where he made his own dough and sauce. Maybe later.): http://www.macheesmo.com/2011/03/cast-iron-pizza/

One trip to Whole Foods later, and I had some Ingredients!

[caption id=“attachment_51” align=“alignnone” width=“300”]Some ingredients for the pizza. Sauce, pancetta, mozzarella, and dough. Some ingredients for the pizza. Sauce, pancetta, mozzarella, and dough.[/caption]

I chopped up some mushrooms and spinach to go on top.

Mushrooms and spinach, chopped up.

The dough was really stretchy and tough to work with…

A wad of pizza dough stretching from my hand.

… but I got it into the pan. Kinda ugly.

Ugly dough in the cast iron skillet.

I did my best to smooth it out, but it was still really uneven. I was worried this would be an issue. Oh well, sauce and toppings on!

Raw pizza in the skillet with sauce, spinach, and mushrooms.

I added the cheese on top of that, then the pancetta on top of the cheese. At this point, I let the oven pre-heat to 450 degrees F while I did other things.

At three minutes to go, I put the skillet on a burner set to high in order to pre-heat the skillet. It started to sizzle a little bit just before the timer went off, but I don’t think it affected anything much.

I popped it into the oven, checked it at 15 minutes, and removed it around 17 or 18 minutes. The pizza slid right out of the pan with just a little encouragement from a spatula.

The whole thing sitting on a plate.

It was really, really good. The crust baked up really thick, and was a bit chewier than I would perhaps have liked. The pancetta gave it a really nice saltyness, which helped the flavor of the sauce (which, I thought, was a little too bright). I cut it into quarters, and Sabrina and I polished it off.