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Even without an oven, it's easy to prepare pizza at home, whether you're making it from scratch or simply heating up a frozen pie.
You likely already have all the tools required to make pizza without an oven right there in your kitchen, or you can purchase them at surprisingly low prices.
Once you have enjoyed grilled or cast iron skillet pizza, you may not go back to oven-baked pizza even once the option presents itself.
While various forms of flatbreads topped with cheeses, meats, vegetables, and herbs have been consumed for centuries by civilizations around the world, pizza, as we know it today, has only been around for about 250 years.
We have the poorer residents of late 1700s Naples to thank for this delectable foodstuff, as pizza was the main foodstuff of the city's working class in that era. Though disdained as peasant food for nearly a century after it became commonplace, many of the pies these 18th century Neapolitans were eating closely resemble pizzas still enjoyed today, such as the Pizza Mozzarella, later renamed the Margherita pizza in honor of Italy's Queen Margherita a century later.
Today, most of us can have a pizza delivered to our door in a matter of minutes after we order over the phone or online. There are also a plethora of frozen pizza options that cook up into surprisingly delectable dinners. And finally, of course, there is always homemade pizza.
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Making pizza from scratch is actually quite simple and, with a bit of practice, arguably the best way to enjoy pizza, as you can control every aspect of the process, from dough consistency to cheese quantity to toppings to seasoning and so on. If you're interested in making your own pizza, consider the book "The Elements of Pizza" by Ken Forkish, and check out our guide to everything you need to make pizza at home.
But whether you're making it from scratch, cooking it from frozen, or re-heating a cold pie you ordered from a restaurant, you can't make pizza without an oven. Right? No. Wrong. You can. That's what we're talking about today, people.
Read on in the slides below to learn how to make pizza without an oven.
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So you want to bake a pizza, whether fresh or frozen, but you don't have a conventional oven? Zero problem! The easiest solution here is to get a countertop electric oven AKA a toaster oven that plugs into any outlet, no gas line connection required.
Many countertop ovens are compact and affordable and will fit the smaller space of a cramped apartment.
At the other end of the price spectrum, the $199.99 Calphalon Quartz Heat Countertop Toaster Oven can also cook up 12-inch pies, and thanks to its 11 preset cooking functions — including pizza, toast, bake, broil, and more — it can cook just about anything else, too. It also comes with a pizza pan.
While surely the easiest way to make pizza without a conventional oven is to simply make it with a countertop oven, that's far from the only way. Stovetop pizza can be delicious to eat and fun to make, as long as you pay close attention to the cooking process.
While you can make stovetop pizza in just about any decent pan, a seasoned cast iron skillet is the best choice for even cooking and great flavor. I recommend a pre-seasoned $24.99 Lodge 12-inch Cast Iron Skillet. Here's how to use it.
Drizzle two to three tablespoons of olive, grapeseed, or avocado oil into the pan and turn the burner to medium heat.
Stretch out fresh dough to fit the diameter of the pan, and make sure your sauce, cheese, and toppings are at the ready.
Place dough into pan and allow it to cook for about three minutes until the bottom is browning nicely.
Flip dough and quickly apply sauce, cheese, and toppings atop the cooked half.
Cook for three to four additional minutes, covering pan if need be to ensure even and thorough melting.
And that's it! Not only is stovetop pizza faster than baked pizza, it's often tastier, too, as the seasoning of the cast iron imparts a rich, herb and spice flavor.
Grilled pizza can be a messy affair. If your dough is too soft, it might drip down past the grates, wasting the food and leading to the most intense grill cleaning session of your life. It's also easy to burn the pie and ruin it that way, too, especially on the first few attempts.
But with patience and practice, grilled pizza will taste as good as the brick oven fired stuff you get from the finest pizzeria in town. Especially if you cook with added wood chips or cook using a pellet stove for that genuine wood-fired oven taste!
Also, I recommend a good pizza grill pan, which can help keep the dough intact as it cooks. Pro tip: Get a set of two, and place one under the raw dough one on top.
When it's time for the flip, you will have the dough sandwiched between the pair, and can then remove the pan left on top that's covering the cooked dough, which is now ready for toppings.
Heat your gas grill to about 600 degrees Fahrenheit, or get a charcoal grill fully lit and evenly burning.
Stretch and roll your dough, then brush both sides with oil.
Place dough on the grill (ideally on a pan) and cook for three minutes; watch out for charring and keep the top off the grill.
Flip the dough, then immediately apply sauce, cheese, and topping.
Close the grill, and cook for an additional three minutes before checking to see if the pie is ready. Which it probably will be.
You can't cook decent fresh pizza in a microwave. Sorry. But you sure can re-heat pies or cook frozen pizza in this now classic appliance. And these days you can get a perfectly good microwave for less than $70. Feel free to check out our guide to the best microwaves you can buy.
Delicious homemade pizza is not only more affordable than ordering out, but with the right tools and tips, it also tastes better. We've rounded up the best pizza-making tools to start you on your way to achieving master status.
Whether you go all-out making your dough and sauce from scratch or just prefer to find convenient solutions that allow you to throw together a quick pie, we've got the best of the best for your pizza making needs.
Here is everything you need to make pizza at home:
