Deep Fried Pizzas Isn't Worth the Effort (And How You Should Make Pizza Instead)

Oven-Baked Pizza

I spent the long weekend elbow-deep in pizza, having batches of Grilled Pizza Dough proofing all over the kitchen. The reason? An attempt at deep-fried pizza.

It turned out … alright I guess. It wasn’t bad, but neither was it better than what you can get over charcoal or from a regular oven. If anything, the deep fried version wound up quite a bit less crispy. 

And to be honest, fried pizzas are less flavourful. Because the deep-fried doughs are cooked plain and the toppings are added after, you miss out on all the deliciousness of the Maillard reaction when tomato sauce caramelises onto the pizza dough.

The cooking process for deep frying is also more involved than baking in an oven. It can be quite stressful to handle a large pot of boiling oil.  (And not to mention the waste: what do you even do with all that oil after?)

And with the deep fried version being quite the unhealthy diversion, the results left me with no real desire to try that again.

For what it's worth, I do really like this combination of toppings: Burrata, whole toasted pistachio, greens and prosciutto 

I still had a couple of leftover pizza doughs balled and ready to go, though I didn’t feel like firing up my Weber grill. So I brushed off my old oven pizza recipe to bake the remaining dough balls as pan pizzas. 

The original instructions still work really well, despite working with a different dough, a different oven, and with a cast iron pan. But the instructions were forgiving, and all those differences didn't seem to matter. I just topped the pizza dough with tomato sauce and cheese, set the oven to the highest heat and let the oven do its thing. And the resulting oven-baked pizza, well, closed the case for deep-frying pizzas forever.

Recipe for Thin Crust Pizza Recipe for the Ordinary Oven

Recipe for Thick Crust Pizza Recipe for the Ordinary Oven

Recipe for Pizza on a Grill