Your Oven's Broiler Is Key To Making Restaurant-Style Pizza At Home

If you've ever tried to cook homemade pizza using that ball of fresh dough you picked up at the grocery store, you're not alone when you're constantly disappointed in what you thought was going to be a restaurant-style meal. While making your own pizza is probably more desirable than tossing a frozen pizza onto the oven rack, the soggier dough often doesn't hold a candle to the crispy version your pizzeria up the street is churning out — but that's because you've been doing it wrong. It turns out one of the best-kept secrets to restaurant-style pizza at home is placing it under the broiler.

There are a few steps you can take to getting the best possible pizza. Good-quality dough, a hot enough oven, and using the right technique — that last one is where the broiler comes in. Next time you break out the fresh dough, your pizza just needs about a minute and a half under the broiler to get to crispy perfection.

The trick to doing this right is a little more complex than just tossing a freshly prepared pizza under the broiler. It actually starts with a skillet. Put a skillet on the stovetop, and turn the heat as high as it goes. The underside will need to get hot for about 20 minutes for this to work. This technique was developed by Michelin-starred chef Heston Blumenthal and will give you amazing results, but not without a little effort.

As the skillet heats, prepare your pizza, but make sure the dough's circumference is not larger than the underside of the skillet (it's more like a personal pizza). Once the skillet is nice and hot, immediately flip it over, and place it on your oven rack. Slide the pizza on top of the hot skillet, then put the whole thing under the broiler for only one minute and 35 seconds. Remove it, and what you're left with is a pizza that was cooked with the perfect amount of heat. This trick essentially mimics the heat of an 800-degree Fahrenheit pizza oven (which an unattainable temperature for most kitchen ovens) because of how hot the skillet gets paired with the direct heat from the broiler.

There are a couple of caveats to this trick. First, you have to make sure you have a skillet that can withstand so much heat for such a long period of time — cast iron or stainless steel would work better than Teflon, for example. Next, the pizza can only be as wide as the underside of the skillet, so you're quite limited in terms of size.

If this trick doesn't work for you, there are a couple of other ways you can mimic restaurant-style pizza. The easiest method is likely to buy a pizza stone. Although it isn't a perfect solution, if you let the stone preheat with your oven, it will help the underside of the pizza achieve a crispier crust. Another idea is to add firebricks to your oven, which are thick bricks that will hold in heat similarly to a pizza stone. Both methods will help build that crispy crust you long for, although they might not give you quite the exact texture of the broiling method.