17" Cast Iron Pan Pizza on YS640 tutorial

It took me 8 years but I have finally reached 100 posts! To celebrate and give back to a community I have learned so much from, I thought I would post my process for making Cast Iron Pan Pizza on the Yoder YS640.

Ever since reading this article on making cast iron pan pizza by Kenji Lopez, I have wanted to try it on my YS640. I also wanted to make one as big as possible. Which means breaking out the Lodge L17SK3.

The Dough recipe - Visual list of ingredients followed by the weights of each one.







Combine until it looks like this.


No need to knead. Cover tightly and set on the counter.


After 24hrs sitting on the counter.


Turn out on floured surface and shape in ball


I used 1/4 C. EVOO to oil the pan


Coat ball and pan with oil


Cover tightly and leave on counter at least two hours. The dough should expand back out to almost the edge. I shaped it a little to end up with this.


I just used some leftover stuff for the topping.


And built a pizza.


I ran the 640 at 550 and moved the deflector plate to the middle position.


The pizza cooked the entire time on the right side of the grill. Here it is after 11 minutes when I rotated it 180 degrees.


Off the grill and resting. Total cook time around 24 minutes.


The crust turned out great and could have went a few more minutes if I wanted more browning on top.



This turned out extremely well and I will be making pizza this way quite often.

smoke-n-mirrors said:

Hey Bratylten, very nice pizza! Do you get so good smoke flavor yoder?

I see we're neighbors of sorts. I think we're close enough to share a pizza anyway!

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If you are referring to smoke on the pizza, you can tell it wasn't done in an oven.
In general, the smoke flavor I get from the 640 suits my tastes very well. But it may not be the taste/amount everyone is looking for.

You can make the hour+ trip here for pizza but I think there is a Brethren somewhere between Waconia and Young America that recently built a brick oven for Pizza. Maybe you could make a road trip out of it.

Pyle's BBQ said:

Did you par cook this before you added toppings? My problem with most thick crust is that the dough under the sauce doesn't cook.

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No. I didn't par cook the dough. I haven't had a problem with under-cooked dough using this method on the 640 or in the oven. And as dadsr4 stated, the longer cook time combined with using CI are magic.

Bigdog said:

You will get a crisper crust if you preheat the cast iron. You would need to make your pizza on a peel that is well coated with corn meal so it will slide off into the skillet.

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I don't have a problem with a crispy crust. If you notice in the one picture where I show the bottom, it's actually cracked in half from lifting it like that.

If you haven't yet, read that article by Kenji. It better explains all the reasons why to make pizza this way and it turns out great.

Bigdog said:

I am also curious as to why you're have your smoker set up that way. When we do them for ATBBQ cooking class we leave the diffuser plate in and have the normal grates on and crank up the heat to 450°.

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Even though Yoder states it should not be a problem, I am cautious about not warping my updated diffuser.

The grill grates serve no purpose other than a perceived reduction in ash blowing around. It also gave me a chance to burn them off.

Also, I have found that this technique works better at the 550° temperature with the 17" skillet.