This Overnight Deep-Dish Pizza Recipe Is the Best Thing I’ve Made All Month

Like many housebound Americans right now, I've been embracing the baking trend with both floury hands. After mastering pretzels, bagels, and Depression-era peanut butter bread, a pillowy pan-pizza recipe caught my eye. I've failed at deep-dish pizza before (though my husband swears "it was good," I know that dough was dense trash), but King Arthur Flour's Crispy Cheesy Pan Pizza Recipe looked too good to ignore.

It's cheesy! It's easy! It's . . . going to take me a minimum of 17 hours?! If there's one element to bread baking that I know eliminates a giant portion of the population from even attempting a recipe, it's the sheer amount of time dough takes to ready itself before you can even put it in the oven. But here's the thing: this bread recipe doesn't take much actual work; it's all about making sure you've timed out your day properly.

You're going to need about 30 minutes to prep the dough, then it needs to chill (literally and colloquially) for a minimum of 12 hours, or up to 72 hours. Here's where timing is important: take the dough out three hours before you want to bake the pizza. It'll need some time to rise in the pan, which is where it becomes all pillowy and airy. After that, it's a piece of cake, er, pie.

If you just want the recipe, scroll to the bottom now. If you want a bunch of doughy, cheesy pictures, scroll slowly.

After combining the dough's ingredients (flour, yeast, salt, water, and a wee bit of olive oil), you have to "fold" the dough ball several times. This involves taking either a wet hand or a spatula and stretching the dough over itself. At first, my dough was extremely sticky and it was tough to fold cleanly. After the third round of folding, it looked like this and was slightly easier to handle with my silicone spatula.

After four rounds of folding, it was time to let the dough hang out in the refrigerator overnight. It looked . . . like a ball of dough?

The next day, it looked . . . like the same ball of dough? Rising was very minimal, leading me to assume I'd made a mistake somewhere. The original recipe did note that the longer it rested during this phase, the more it would rise, so if I'd let it sit over the weekend, I would've probably had a larger dough.

My worries diminished when I moved onto the next phase: pressing it into the pan. Plan to have oily fingers for 30 minutes, because the dough will shrink back after the first couple attempts at dimpling. Here's how it looked after my third time stretching it:

And here's how it looked after two hours of rising in the pan:

Huge, I know. Don't you want to shrink down and sleep on it?

Once your dough has risen and your oven has been preheated, you're golden. The key now is to resist your urge to slather the dough in pizza sauce. Shredded mozzarella goes first; it should completely cover the dough, stretching to the edges of the pan, where it'll melt and caramelize. If you put the sauce down first, it'll saturate the dough and make it soggy. Here's mine after two rounds of mozz and some sauce:

(Just to clarify, this is not an advertisement for Tillamook or Mezzetta, but those brands are my go-tos for cheese and tomato sauces. I also live in the Pacific Northwest, where Tillamook is a way of life.)

Finally, look at this GORGEOUS pan pizza that popped out of my oven after 22 minutes:

She's gooey, she's saucy, and she needs her crust to be gently moved away from the sides of the pan, otherwise her cheese will adhere to the cast iron and you'll need an icepick to free her. Trust me, I made this mistake.

In closing, I'll leave you with this picture of my dog, which sums up how both he and I feel about this pizza: drool-worthy.