Detroit-Style
Pan Pizza
Easily the best pizza I've made at home. Top 5 even against restaurants. A combination of a couple different recipes I've seen — I go very heavy on the EVOO, skip cooking the sauce, and use a specific cheese blend. The pan is not negotiable.
Active time
45 min
Total time
20–24 hrs
Serves
4
Oven temp
500°F
Sources
Dough
Babish — Pan Pizza (no-knead dough recipe)
basicswithbabish.co ↗
Technique
YouTube — general Detroit-style technique
youtube.com ↗
Equipment
Lloyd Pans Detroit-style pizza pan
amazon.com ↗
Ingredients
What you need
Dough — Babish's recipe, verbatim
16 oz
flour, plus more for work surface
2 tsp
kosher salt
2 1/4 tsp
active dry yeast
11 oz
room temperature water
heavy hand
EVOO
— several tablespoons total: in the bowl, in the pan
Sauce — no cooking required
1 can
whole, chunk, or diced tomatoes
— it's going in the blender, doesn't matter
good shake
dried oregano
— most of the three
shake
dried basil
shake
dried thyme
to taste
garlic powder
to taste
red pepper flakes
pinch
salt
Cheese
half
low-moisture mozzarella, grated
half
Monterey Jack, grated
— or brick cheese if you're in MN; bread cheese from Wegmans also works great
some
parmesan, grated
— thrown in for good measure
Method
How to make it
Day before — dough
Make the dough. Combine flour, kosher salt, and yeast in a large bowl. Add room temperature water and mix with a wooden spoon until a shaggy dough forms with no dry clumps. Don't knead it.
First rest. Generously oil a bowl with EVOO — a couple tablespoons. Put the dough in, cover with plastic wrap, and let it rest 18–24 hours.
Day of — setup
Preheat with the stone. Put your pizza stone in the oven and preheat to 500°F. Let it heat for at least 45 minutes. This is what gives the bottom crust its crunch.
Make the sauce. Dump the can of tomatoes into a blender. Add oregano, basil, thyme, garlic powder, red pepper flakes, and a bit of salt. Pulse — you want it not chunky but not completely smooth. Don't cook it.
Pan the dough. Add another couple tablespoons of EVOO to the pan — coat it generously. Press the dough into the dark metal pan, working it toward the edges. If it springs back, let it rest 5 minutes and try again. It'll get there.
Assembly & bake
Top it. Layer cheese all the way to the edges — the edge cheese fries against the pan and becomes the crust. Add sauce in stripes or pools on top of the cheese (Detroit style goes cheese-first, sauce on top). Add any other toppings.
Bake 15–20 minutes. Place the pan directly on the hot pizza stone. Bake at 500°F for 15–20 minutes. The dark metal pan makes it hard to see if the edges are done from outside the oven — if you can pull it out to check, look for the cheese crust to be deep golden and for the pizza to have pulled away from the pan edges by about a quarter inch. That's your signal.
The pan matters a lot. This does not work in a glass pan. You need dark metal with sharp right-angle edges — the kind that conducts heat efficiently and lets the cheese fry against the wall. The lore is something about old pans from the auto industry.
Notes & what I changed
No-knead slow-rise is the move. I looked at a bunch of dough recipes and kept coming back to this one. The 18–24 hour rest does the work that kneading would otherwise do.
Go very heavy on the EVOO. More than the recipe suggests. A couple tablespoons in the resting bowl, another couple in the pan. This is what creates the fried bottom.
I don't cook the sauce. The Babish recipe and the technique video both cook the sauce. I skip it — just blend the canned tomatoes with dried herbs. The oven time finishes it.
On the cheese blend. Half mozz, half Monterey Jack gives you meltability and that specific flavor. Brick cheese is the authentic Detroit choice — if you're in MN you can probably find it. The Wegmans bread cheese is an unexpected but genuinely good substitute.
On the doneness cue. The quarter-inch pullaway from the pan edges is the most reliable signal I've found. The dark pan makes visual checks from the oven door unreliable.