Pan Pizza: The Easiest You'll Ever Make, Step by Step
- Fabio
- Aug 17
- 4 min read
Sometimes the simplest recipes are the best ones. Today I want to walk you through a pizza dough that needs no special equipment, no kneading in the traditional sense, and honestly very little effort — just a bit of patience. All you need is water, flour, yeast, salt, and a spoon.
Besides, it tastes like childhood to me: while I was growing up, "Pizza in Teglia" was the go-to Saturday night meal. But it's not just a homemade delish, in Italy it's also very common in its commercial version — one of the many pizza styles I've described in my second book, the novel about the story of pizza.
Like all hands-on tasks, watching someone doing the job makes everything easier, that's why I recommend watching this video:
Figuring Out How Much Dough You Need for Your Pan
Before jumping into the dough itself, it's worth spending a minute on quantities. They have to match the pan we're using and the desired thickness.
So calculate the area of your tray, and divide it in half: that gives you the amount of dough needed for a nicely thick pizza, around 1.5 cm. Scale up or down if you prefer a thicker or thinner pizza. I've got a calculator to remove the guesswork, find it in this page.
The pan I always use is 30 by 23 cm, so these are the exact doses:
194 gr flour
146 gr water, room temperature
0.97 gr fresh yeast - convert to dry yeast with the free tool in this article
4.27 gr salt
One thing that does matter regardless of quantities: pick a flour with a protein content of at least 12.5%. It only takes a second to check the nutritional table before buying.
Mixing, Not Kneading
Here's where this recipe breaks from tradition. When you first combine everything with a spoon, you're not kneading, you're simply hydrating the flour. No gluten development happens at this stage; that comes later.
Make sure there's no dry flour left at the bottom of your bowl — just grab it up with the dough itself. What you'll end up with is a rough, sticky mass, and that's exactly how it should look at this point.
The no-knead method I'm about to describe is pretty common nowadays, and we have British nutritionist Doris Grant to thank for it – she was the first known baker to share it back in the 1940s, even though the technique had probably been around for a few decades before that.
Building strength: Stretches, Slaps and Folds
This is where the magic happens. Instead of kneading, the dough goes through a series of rest-and-fold cycles, and this is what slowly transforms that rough, sticky mass into a smooth, elastic dough.
The rhythm is simple:
Cover the dough and let it rest for 15–20 minutes.
Wet your hands, stretch the edge of the dough, and fold it toward the centre. Go all the way around.
Cover again and rest another 15 minutes.
Repeat.
Each round the dough comes together a little more. It's still sticky after the first couple of rounds, and that's completely normal.
For one of the later rounds, switch things up with a slap & fold: wet your work surface slightly, grab the dough from the side, slap it down on the board, and fold. Rotate 90 degrees and repeat. This technique really helps bring everything together, and you'll start to see the dough getting noticeably smoother on top.
By the final round, the transformation is obvious: the gluten looks smooth, nice, and elastic. At that point, the dough just needs a nap.
To work out the exact timetable, including the next stages' you can use the calculator you find in this page, it's helpful and very cheap.
Cold Fermentation: Let Time Do the Work
Since this is a stretch-and-bake pizza made in a rectangular tray, drizzle some olive oil inside the container (including the walls, since the dough will expand quite a bit) before placing the dough in.
Cover it and let it sit at room temperature for at least an hour, then move it to the fridge overnight — around 20 hours or a bit more. The next day, take it out and let it come back to room temperature before baking; a couple of hours is usually enough if your kitchen is around 20°C (68°F).
Baking
With a bit of oil on your hands, turn the dough out of the bowl and gently stretch it to the edges of the tray. At this stage it barely needs any encouragement, it does most of the work itself.
For the oven:
Preheat for 30–35 minutes at the highest temperature your oven can reach. My home oven reaches 250°C which is great, but 230–240°C works fine too, as the dough withstand comfortably a longer bake.
Baking happens in three stages:
Par-bake the dough with no toppings, placing the pan on the floor of the oven for a boost of heat from below. About 5–6 minutes, keeping an eye on the bottom.
Move the pan to the middle shelf for another 5–6 minutes, until the surface turns a nice golden colour.
Add your tomato sauce and mozzarella (make sure you have drained the mozzarella beforehand), then return to the oven until ready — typically 2 or 3 minutes are enough.
Total baking time will land somewhere between 14 and 18 minutes, of course the exact timing depends on your oven and the temperature you're working with.
And that's it! A proper pizza with minimal effort, a spoon, and a bit of patience while the fridge does the heavy lifting.
If you liked this article, you’ll find a few ways to support my work and help me keep nerding out about pizza. If you have any questions or thoughts just leave a comment, I always enjoy a good old pizza conversation.
Ciao, see you next time 🍕
Here's how you can support me!
🍕 You can get my first book or the second one
🌾 You can simply buy me a bag of flour
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