New England Greek Style Pizza Recipe

Olive oil-enriched dough topped with an oregano-heavy sauce and lots of cheese.

A slice of New England Greek-Style pizza on a speckled ceramic plate. There is a cutting board holding more pizza on the left hand side of the image

Serious Eats / Qi Ai

Why It Works

  • Slowly simmering the pizza sauce produces a rich, concentrated flavor. Reserving a portion of crushed tomatoes and stirring them in at the end keeps the reduced sauce bright and fresh-tasting.
  • Using a 50/50 blend of shredded mozzarella and white cheddar adds tanginess.
  • Greasing the pans with a combination of olive oil and vegetable shortening results in a bottom crust that is both flavorful and crispy.
  • If the bottom crusts are not browned to your liking when the pies come out of the oven, the recipe provides an optional stovetop cooking step.

There's a good reason why Greek pizza, a style found mostly in the "Pizza Houses" and "Houses of Pizza" in New England is not more popular, and the reason is this: It's not very good.

Ok, let me modify that statement. It's usually not very good. See, most pizza, like Neapolitan or New York-style or even deep dish pizza are still edible, and in fact quite good even when they aren't at the peak of their form. There's a reason the old saying that "pizza is like sex—even when it's bad, it's good,"* exists, but it fails to take into account Greek pizza, which is only ever good when it's not terrible. There's no real middle ground here.

*or was it the other way around?

For you scientific types, if we were to graph the absolute quality of a pizza based on its commitment to the form versus the way it tastes, we'd get curves something like this.

A graph depicting pizza quality on the x-axis and pizza flavor on the y-axis.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

So while a 6-quality Neapolitan pizza may rank about 5 on the overall flavor scale, a 6-quality Greek pizza is still just as bad as a 1-quality Greek pizza.

In other words, if your Greek pizza ain't spectacular, then it ain't worth eating. And spectacular is what we're after.

Greek Pizza: Typical vs. Archetype

The concept of a Greek-style pie is pretty simple. Start with standard pizza dough enriched with a bit of olive oil. Stretch the dough into a steel or aluminum pie pan coated with another layer of oil. Top with a chunky, well-cooked tomato sauce heavily flavored with oregano, then pile on masses of cheese. Bake in a moderately hot oven (around 500°F or 260°C) until cooked through.

But in order to be victorious, you must know and understand both your friends and your enemies.

Let's first take a look what most commonly passes for Greek-style pizza:

A pizza with very thick crust slathered in cheese and rounds of sausages.

Serious Eats / Carey Jones

Even without tasting it, the flaws are pretty obvious. We start with a crust that's so uniformly golden brown and fluffy looking that you don't need to imagine too hard to picture its dense-crumbed Wonderbread-like texture. Next we move on to a pale orange sauce that just screams "Spaghetti-O's!" Finally, we see a congealed, vast blanket of cheese. Rubbery, bland, and barely cooked.

Gross, right? I spent way too many all-nighters in college ordering in this kind of stuff.

This, on the other hand, is what great Greek pizza should look like:

A pizza with thin crust, covered in cheese and red pepper flakes.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

This is a pie from George's on the Cape, and to date, it's the best Greek pizza I've had.

We start with a crust that's shatteringly crisp on the bottom, with a texture that's almost deep-fried, which makes sense, because it essentially is. Next there's a thick-but-not-as-thick-as-Sicilian layer of chewy, bready crust that gives way to a tomato sauce that is definitely cooked and heavy on the oregano, but with enough brightness to really shine.

Finally, we come to the cheese which while extremely thick, is perfectly melted, pulling away from the slices in thin strands with a pretty significant amount of browning on the top surface. The cheese has just barely begun to separate, leaving the faintest slick of orange oil on top of each slice. In most cases, this amount of cheese would be called heavy. Here, I'd describe it as generous.

Crisp, gooey, salty, and fresh, I'd put a great slice of Greek pizza up against a Neapolitan or New York any day of the week.

In order to perfect the style at home, I'd have to go through each element—sauce, cheese, and crust—one at a time. Here's what I found.

Dialing in the Sauce

Pizza sauce ain't just pizza sauce. Like deciding whether to ford the stream or go around it when making your way down the Oregon Trail, you've gotta understand your surroundings.* So, for a New York pizza, you'd use a lightly cooked, lightly seasoned sauce, while for a Neapolitan, you'd probably go with straight up San Marzano tomatoes blended with a bit of salt.

*Extra wagon wheels and time? Go around. Little Katie's got dysentery? Shore up that Prairie schooner and float'er across!

For Greek Pizza, you want a deeper, richer, cooked tomato flavor. The quickest way to get there? Tomato paste. A cooked tomato product made by slowly reducing tomato juice, it has a distinct richness and slight metallic flavor.

For my first attempt, I cooked down some garlic, a good amount of dried oregano, and a pinch of red pepper flakes in olive oil before adding tomato paste, and finally a can of crushed tomatoes. After letting the whole thing simmer for an hour I tasted it and was...unimpressed.

A thick and broken tomato sauce in a pan.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

Cooked is one thing, but this just tasted downright flat. Cooking it for a shorter period of time resulted in a sauce that wasn't quite rich enough. I tried tweaking the ratio of paste to crushed tomatoes which helped a bit, but the real key turned out to be reserving a third of the crushed tomatoes before I simmered the sauce down, adding them back to the pot right at the end.

Like the Prince of Bel-Air, my sauce suddenly found itself to be both fresh and rich!

Tangy Mozzarella?

There are few serious pizza styles around the world that don't use mozzarella as their base, and growing up, I always figured it was also the cheese of choice for Greek pizza. But something didn't sit quite right. The cheese on a Greek pizza doesn't melt in quite the same gooey strands as regular mozzarella does. It seems more prone to breaking, just a bit greasier, and a tad tangier to boot.

Bottom Shelf correspondent Will Gordon clued me on to something when he asked...

Do low-end "house of pizza" places all cut their mozz w/ cheddar? The one I worked at in high school did and it was pretty standard middle-of-the-road Massachusetts Greek crud, so I assume it's common enough, but having a hard time finding confirmation. (Not real cheddar, obviously, but a big block from Sysco; I think its job is to provide actual flavor, since the big block of Sysco mozz doesn't do anything but melt nice.)

Well, Will, I did a bit of digging and confirmed from at least two different reliable sources that yep, most Pizza Houses cut their mozzarella with either cheddar or provolone. Happy birthday, buddy.

A pile of shredded cheddar cheese next to a block of Parmesan cheese on a wooden cutting board.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

A 50/50 ratio of whole milk mozzarella and sharp white cheddar proved to be the ideal mix for my palate, though I must admit: I got a little fancy pants and added a grating of good Parmigiano-Reggiano to the top of my pies as well. (Don't tell the Greeks.)

Finding the Right Dough

As with sauce, Greek-style pizza crust is a beast unto itself. It's not quite like focaccia, which is a bit airier, nor is it quite like square pie/grandma style, which is a bit too chewy. It's more like New York style, but obviously much thicker. The fact that it gets cooked in a pan with oil so that the bottom can fry is also significant.

The easiest/best method I found to make the dough was to use a no-knead dough. That is, a dough that you bring together just minimally then allow to sit overnight at room temperature. Overnight, enzymes get to work breaking down long flour proteins into shorter ones, which then entangle themselves with one another to form the long, stretchy network of gluten which allows your dough to form those great airy, chewy bubbles.

Now normally, when you stretch out dough, you need to do it on a floured surface, since you're going to be setting the stretched pizza crust directly on a stone. With Greek pizza, you're going to be placing it in a greased pan, which means that you can stretch it on a greased surface (and let it rise in a greased bowl). I find all of this terribly convenient, since oily dough sticks way less than floured dough.

After allowing the dough to rise overnight, I ball it up, let it rise a second time in greased bowls, stretch it, transfer it to my greased pizza pans, and let it rise one last time before topping and baking.

Frying up a Crispy, Flavorful Crust

Asides from the DL on the cheddar, Will's former life as a pie slinger also let me in on another bit of intel: perhaps it's not actually olive oil going into those pans.

A bottle of extra-virgin olive oil and a stick of shortening, Crisco.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

See, according to Will, the Greek pie pans he worked with were greased with Crisco. Interesting.

Why would one want to do such a thing? Well, there's the obvious factor of cost. But let's give the piemen a bit more credit than that. Vegetable shortening also happens to be a superb frying medium. Whenever you're frying something, whether it's perfect french fries, fried chicken, or tempura, the crispness of its crust is directly related to the type of frying medium you're using. Namely, the more highly saturated the fat you fry in, the crisper it gets. Anyone who's ever eaten potatoes cooked in duck fat, or better yet, beef fat, can attest to this. The Belgians swear by horse fat. I'll take their word for it.

"The more highly saturated the fat you fry in, the crisper it gets

Imagine a fat molecule as a long string of conga dancers, each one grabbing the hips of the person in front of them with both hands. When every person is holding on with two hands (i.e. the fat is fully saturated), the line is pretty inflexible, so stays fairly straight. Now imagine one person decides to answer a text on their cell phone while the dance is going on. Rude, yeah? They lift one hand, suddenly creating a weak point in the line. The line can quite easily bend and form a kink at this point now, and your fat has become mono-unsaturated. Now imagine that half the people in the line suddenly get text messages all at once (what are the chances?). Your fat is now poly-unsaturated, and has gained the ability to become quite kinky indeed.*

*no, not like that

What's the point? Well, the straighter and stiffer your fat, the more easily it can pack together into a firm cohesive structure. Every fat or oil is made up of a combination of saturated and unsaturated fat molecules, and thus there's a direct relationship between how firm a fat is and the ratio of its saturated to unsaturated fats. So thin, easily pourable fats like olive oil or canola oil are relatively low in saturated fats, making them quite poor mediums for frying. On the other end of the spectrum is peanut oil, which is quite viscous at room temperature. It produces exceptionally crisp food.

Go even further down the line, and you find fats that are solid, even at room temperature. Most animal fats fall into this category, as does vegetable shortening, which is vegetable oil that has been artificially saturated through a process known as hydrogenation. (Essentially, hydrogen molecules are forcefully added to the fat chain—the equivalent of putting a text message blocker on all those cell phones.)**

TL;DR version: the more solid the fat, the crisper the crust.

**Saturated fats, which for a long time were believed to be the unhealthy ones, are not the same as trans-fats, which are now thought to be the unhealthy ones, and are a particular type of unsaturated fat in which the conga line has not just bent, but has had half its members flipped upside down. I can't attest to the validity of any sort of nutritional information, which seems to shift on a daily basis. I just do what tastes good. In moderation, of course.

This crust was baked in a pan greased with Crisco shortening:

A crisp and sturdy pizza crust.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

Crisp, thick, sturdy, almost flaky in texture. Sorely lacking in flavor.

This one, on the other hand, was baked in a pan with olive oil:

A thin and lofty pizza crust.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

Flavorful and robust, but not nearly as crisp as I'd like it.

The solution? A mixture of olive oil and shortening.

You all coming along with me here? Good, because we're in the home stretch.

Assembly and Baking

I tried baking pies in round cake pans (fine, if you want to kinda wreck your cake pans with the high heat), in springform pans (bad idea, unless you enjoy oil dripping out onto the floor of your oven), and pie pans (works ok, but the pies are quite small) before finally settling on my old stand-by: the cast iron pan. (Yeah, you can use an oven-proof nonstick skillet if you haven't got cast iron. Or just get a cast iron pan. Seriously.)

They're sturdy, attractive, take well to heat, nearly invincible, and nonstick. Basically, all the same qualities that I enjoy about my wife.

Apply sauce thickly...

Spreading tomato sauce onto an unbaked pizza dough.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

...and cheese even thicker, making sure to spread it out to the very edges (we want some good burnt cheese bits at the edge of the crust). Bake 15 to 20 minutes in a 500°F oven, and you've got this:

A charred and blistered pizza.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

I know, right?

Now, because of the thickness of the cast-iron pan, and the very nature of the way ovens heat, there's a good chance that the bottom of your pie won't be quite as done as you like it by the time the top is done.

Lifting up a pizza crust with a fish spatula.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

Mine could use a bit more browning.

The beauty of cooking in a pan is that if your bottom ain't done enough, all you gotta do is drop it right on top of the stove and cook it over moderately low heat until the bottom is just as crisp, charred, or downright burnt as you'd like.

A wedge of charred and browned pizza.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

The number of people in the world who have been exposed to great Greek pizza is woefully small, and I'm telling you, this is pretty great stuff folks. Great enough that you may even be able to convince your Italian friends that perhaps Italy is not the be-all and end-all when it comes to all things food-related.

Greek-style pizza in a cast iron skillet.

Serious Eats / J. Kenji López-Alt

Ok, perhaps not quite that great. But you get my point.

One last note: Greek pizza does not reheat well, nor does it even sit well. It must be consumed within the first 15 minutes after it comes out of the oven. I have a feeling that this won't a problem for most people.

August 2011

Recipe Details

New England Greek Style Pizza Recipe

Active 45 mins
Total 8 hrs
Serves 4 to 6 servings
Makes 2 pizzas

Ingredients

For the Dough:

  • 400g (14 ounces, about 2 1/2 cups) bread flour

  • 4g (about 1 teaspoon) instant yeast

  • 8g (about 1 tablespoon) kosher salt (or 1 1/2 teaspoons table salt)

  • 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

  • 260g (about 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons) water

For the Sauce:

  • 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

  • 2 medium cloves garlic, grated on a Microplane grater (about 2 teaspoons)

  • 1 teaspoon dried oregano

  • 1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes

  • 3 ounces tomato paste

  • 1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes

  • Kosher salt

To Assemble:

  • 2 tablespoons vegetable shortening, melted

  • 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

  • 8 ounces freshly grated whole milk mozzarella

  • 8 ounces freshly grated white cheddar

  • 2 ounces Parmigiano-Reggiano

Directions

  1. Combine flour, yeast, and salt in a large bowl and whisk until homogenous. Add oil and water and stir with wooden spoon until combined. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise at room temperature at least 8 hours and up to 24.

    A metal bowl holding the pizza dough which has been resting at room temperature for over eight hours.

    Serious Eats / Qi Ai

  2. The next day, turn dough out onto lightly floured surface and divide in half. Form balls with each half, then place into lightly oiled bowls, coating all surfaces of the balls with oil. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside at room temperature.

    A two-image collage. The top image shows the dough, cut in half and resting on a lightly floured stone surface. the bottom image shows a ball of that same dough, now smooth and lightly oiled inside of a metal bowl.

    Serious Eats / Qi Ai

  3. Meanwhile, make the sauce. Heat olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add garlic, oregano, and pepper flakes and cook for 30 seconds until fragrant. Add tomato paste and cook, stirring constantly for 1 minute. Add 2/3 of crushed tomatoes and stir to combine. Reduce heat to lowest setting and cook, stirring occasionally for 1 hour. Stir in remaining crushed tomatoes and season to taste with salt. Remove from heat and set aside.

    A two-image collage. The top image shows a stainless steel saucepan holding shimmering oil and garlic, oregano, and chile flakes. The bottom image shows crushed tomatoes and tomato paste now added to the saucepan, being stirred by a wooden spoon.

    Serious Eats / Qi Ai

  4. Stretch the dough: Coat two 10-inch cast iron skillets (or cake pans/oven-safe nonstick skillets) with 1 tablespoon each of shortening and olive oil. Transfer dough balls one at a time to a large cookie sheet and stretch out into a 10-inch circle. Transfer the circles to the greased skillets. Cover and allow to rise for 1 hour at room temperature. Meanwhile, adjust the oven rack to the bottom position and preheat oven to 500°F (260°C). Combine the cheeses in a large bowl and cover until ready to use.

    A two-image collage. The top image shows a ball of the oil-coated dough now spread into a 10-inch circle on a half sheet pan. The bottom image shows the dough transferred to a 10-inch, greased cast iron pan. The pan is covered with plastic wrap.

    Serious Eats / Qi Ai

  5. When dough has risen, top each circle with 1 cup of sauce (you will have leftover sauce), spreading it to within half an inch of the edge. Divide grated cheese evenly between the two pies, spreading it all the way to the edge of each pie.

    A two-image collage. The top image shows the cast iron pan holding the now-risen dough, topped with pizza sauce. The bottom image shows the uncooked pizza now topped with shredded cheese.

    Serious Eats / Qi Ai

  6. Bake pies until top is bubbly and golden brown in spots and cheese has charred around edges, 15 to 20 minutes. Remove pizzas from oven and using a thin metal spatula, release the edges from the pans. Carefully lift pies to check for doneness underneath. If you'd like a darker bottom crust, set each pie directly over a medium-low flame and cook, turning occasionally until desired level of doneness is reached.

    A two-image collage. The top image is a top-down shot of the pizza, now fully cooked and browned, inside of the cast iron pan. The bottom image is a shot of the pizza being lifted out of the pan with a slotted spatula, showing off how the bottom is golden and browned.

    Serious Eats / Qi Ai

  7. Slide pizzas onto cutting board, allow to rest 2 minutes, slice, and serve immediately. For best results, pizzas should be eaten within 15 minutes of baking.

    The pizza, cut into size slices, on a wooden cutting board.

    Serious Eats / Qi Ai

Special Equipment

10-inch cast iron pans, pizza pans, cake pans, or oven-safe nonstick skillets

Nutrition Facts (per serving)
763 Calories
43g Fat
65g Carbs
31g Protein
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Nutrition Facts
Servings: 4 to 6
Amount per serving
Calories 763
% Daily Value*
Total Fat 43g 55%
Saturated Fat 17g 87%
Cholesterol 78mg 26%
Sodium 1587mg 69%
Total Carbohydrate 65g 24%
Dietary Fiber 5g 18%
Total Sugars 8g
Protein 31g
Vitamin C 16mg 78%
Calcium 608mg 47%
Iron 3mg 18%
Potassium 688mg 15%
*The % Daily Value (DV) tells you how much a nutrient in a food serving contributes to a daily diet. 2,000 calories a day is used for general nutrition advice.
(Nutrition information is calculated using an ingredient database and should be considered an estimate.)