Basil Pesto Pan Pizza

The Pizza Dough Experiment

The brother who cooks and I recently fell into conversation about our kitchen experiments. He highly recommended a no knead pizza dough recipe from the Serious Eats website, which is run by the same guy who wrote the awesome cookbook that he had given me for my recent birthday, The Food Lab. Apparently, all this dough required was time to rise. Otherwise, it was super low maintenance; my brother said he once kept a batch in his refrigerator for a week!

I was intrigued, so I followed the link he gave me and I checked out the recipe. The only thing I didn’t have in the house already was instant yeast. I had a jar full of active dry yeast in the refrigerator for bread making, but that is different. So I went to the supermarket and got what I needed. The recipe steps seemed straightforward enough: just measure and mix the ingredients in a large bowl, let the dough rise, pat it into pans, let it rise again, top it, and bake it. Unlike the book, the ingredients were measured exactly in grams, and then approximated into American dry and liquid volumes. Since I’m a no fuss kind of girl - and I couldn’t figure out how to convert my digital scale into grams – I just followed the approximate American measurements. The dough came together very easily, but too late to be dinner that evening. The curious part of the instructions was that the bowl with the bowl be completely sealed with Saran wrap, rather than just merely covered with a clean dishtowel. After the dough had been rising for five hours, the Saran wrap was stretched to its limit with the gasses emitted by the dough.

Approximately two and a half hours before I wanted to eat, I took the dough out of the Saran wrapped bowl and proceeded with the recipe steps. It didn’t quite fill the large bowl, but it had become gigantic! At this point, I set half of the dough aside in a quart Ziploc bag in the refrigerator to use later in the week. There was a minor glitch in that my cake pans were nine-inch pans instead of the recommended ten-inch pans. I compared my cake pans to my turquoise enamel cast iron skillet, and they were the same size. I didn’t think that there would be any appreciable difference between using a cake pan and using a cast iron skillet, so I decided to use my cake pan because it was nonstick. When I patted the dough into the pan, there was about a two inch space between the dough and the rim of the pan.

Basil Pesto Sauce

My experiments with Strawberry Basil Jam left me with a lot of leftover fresh basil. So, while the dough was on its second rise, I decided to make a basil pesto pizza rather than a traditional tomato sauce pizza. I had a container of pine nuts in my horde cabinet that I had purchased a month or two ago for a recipe that I never tested. I also had a bagful of decent parmesan cheese in the refrigerator for my pasta. That all meant I was in business!

Once you have the ingredients, basil pesto sauce is simple: wash the basil; detach the leaves from the stems; process the leaves with a few cloves of garlic, equal amounts of pine nuts and parmesan, and just enough olive oil to make it a sauce. This is so easy that it was one of the Italian dishes that I taught my local friends when I was living in South America. (Basil is albahaca in Spanish, and I don’t think I ever knew how to ask for pine nuts because we just searched the supermarket and found them with the spices.)

This time it took about 20 minutes to throw together the basil pesto, from the time I opened the refrigerator to pull out the basil to the time the sauce was complete. I used most of two four-ounce containers of basil from the supermarket (the heat wave has taken a toll on the basil in my container garden). Rather than use fresh garlic, I was lazy and finished off the jar of minced garlic in my refrigerator. I used one four-ounce package of pine nuts, which measured roughly ¾ cup. To match the pine nuts, I used roughly ¾ cup of parmesan cheese. At the beginning, when processing the basil, I had to use a liberal dose of extra virgin olive oil to get the leaves moving in the mini prep. By the end, the stuff was more of a paste, so I had to blend in a liberal dose of the same olive oil to turn it into a sauce.

The Final Product

After two more hours of rising in a tightly sealed space, I had expected that dough would have grown to fill almost the entire pan. But it didn’t. When I unwrapped the Saran wrapped cake pan, I still had to do some manipulations to release the air pockets and to push the dough all the way to the edges. The dough resisted my manipulations, so I picked it up and gave it a good stretch. Then it fit perfectly.

The final steps of the recipe were to top the pizza and then bake it at 550F. Both seemed a little odd to me. First, because I usually bake my pizzas “naked” for about ten minutes to cook the crust and then I bake them for another ten minutes to melt the cheese and finish cooking the crust. I find that this method always prevents a soggy crust. But I went with what the recipe said to do, and smeared the crust with my fresh basil pesto, topped it with some fresh tomato slices, and then covered it with shredded mozzarella. The instruction to start preheating the oven to 550F an hour before baking the pizza gave me some pause, especially since I wasn’t even sure that my oven went up that high. Yet again, I followed the instructions loyally.

After fifteen minutes at 550F, I pulled out my pizza. I only had a normal spatula, which wasn’t thin enough to lift up the crust for me to check the bottom of it, so I just trusted the recipe that the cooking time was sufficient. I was a little disappointed that the cheese was all browned and almost burned looking. (Gooey cheese is my favorite part of a pizza!) In order to not ruin my cake pan with knife marks, I did some fancy maneuvering with my normal spatula and lifted the entire pizza out onto a cutting board. There I cut it into slices, let it cool a bit, and then tried it.

My brother’s endorsement of the recipe was that it was reminiscent of the Pizza Hut Pan Pizzas of our childhood. And that it was! It was a little greasy on the bottom (probably my fault for not measuring exactly how much oil I used to coat the pan) but otherwise it was delicious. I’d definitely make this recipe again, although I will still keep the family pizza dough recipes handy for when I want pizza in less than ten hours! And since I still have a ball of dough in my refrigerator, the likelihood of my having it again within the next three days is pretty high. Unless there are directions for freezing the dough in the recipe comments . . . which there were!

The Frozen Dough Experiment

According to the comments in the recipe, the risen dough could be frozen by placing it in a Ziploc bag after the initial rise. In order to use frozen dough, it should first be defrosted in the refrigerator. Then, the recipe can be picked up at two and a half hours before eating, at the “press into pans and let rise for two hours” step.

My dough was in the freezer for approximately two weeks when I opted to defrost it. I let it sit in the refrigerator for about a day to defrost before I tried working with it. The defrosted dough was still cold, but otherwise fairly easy to work with. It stretched nicely into the pan for its rise. Again after the two-hour rise, the dough didn’t fill the pan so I still had to manipulate it some. The dough was still slightly cold, and didn’t seem to have risen much.

This time I didn’t pour olive oil into my 9-inch cake pan to grease it; I used olive oil cooking spray instead. Fortunately, I had leftover basil pesto in the freezer as well and I had bought too many tomatoes for my Persian recipe experiments. So I was able to make another basil-tomato pan pizza. Again, the 550F baking temperature made me nervous but I followed the recipe as loyally as I did before.

The finished product was not as puffy as the pizza made from the fresh dough. In fact, despite the lighter oil in the pan, the crust was crisp. I think it was because two hours was just barely enough time for the dough to come to room temperature, never mind rise. But, despite being different, it was still good.

The Basil Pesto Recipe

Although “fresh” pesto is available in the supermarket, nothing beats making your own! Since this is a traditional family recipe, there are no exact measurements. You just have to feel and taste your way to the perfect sauce.

Pignoli nuts are also called pine nuts, and are often found in the supermarket either in the produce section with the bulk nuts or in the section with the Italian specialty foods. I never tried to make basil pesto outside of New England (except for that one time in South America) so I’m not quite sure where to look if your supermarket doesn’t have an Italian specialty foods section.

Of course, the “food processor” referred to in the recipe is a 3½ cup mini prep, not a full size Cuisinart. You would be drowning in basil pesto if you attempted this recipe by packing the bowl of a full size Cuisinart with basil leaves! That’s not to say you can’t use a full size Cuisinart for the recipe, just start with a modest amount of basil.


Fresh basil leaves (no stems)
4-10 cloves garlic, smashed
Parmesan cheese
Pignoli nuts
Fresh ground black pepper

1. Pack food processor bowl with washed fresh basil leaves and garlic.
2. Turn on processor to puree. Slowly drizzle olive oil into processor as it is running until a thick paste forms.
3. Turn off processor. Scrape down sides. Add parmesan cheese and pignoli nuts in roughly equal amounts.
4. Turn on processor to puree until pignoli nuts are ground and a thick paste forms. Add a little more olive oil if it seems too thick, or is refusing to process smoothly.
5. Turn off processor. Season with black pepper. Taste and adjust accordingly.