Crispy Bar-Style Pizza

This is the ideal pie for a total amateur to cook.

pizza cut into 8 slices on cutting board

Serious Eats / Julia Estrada

Why It Works

  • The dough ferments for one to five days for the best flavor.
  • A two-stage cooking process yields a crunchy but slightly chewy crust.
  • The fillings extend all the way to the edge of the crust to ensure the crispiest perimeter.

As an equal-opportunity pizza lover, it's always exciting to me when a style that's been heretofore outside of my personal pizza sphere enters into it. It happens with increasing rarity these days, which is both a good and bad thing. Bad, because like my marriage, I never, ever want things to become routine (not that they've started to yet, dear), but good because it means whenever I do manage to try something that's both novel and stellar, it's all the more exciting.

Recent mind-blowingly good pizza experience: the bar-style pies at Star Tavern in Orange, New Jersey.

What exactly is bar pizza? Ed explains its mechanics pretty well in Pizza, a Slice of Heaven:

It's usually very thin-crusted to (I'm guessing) leave plenty of room in the eater's stomach for beer. It's baked in a gas oven that may have replaced a coal oven if the bar is old enough. Bar pizza is made with decent, commercial, aged mozzarella and comes topped with canned mushrooms, standard pepperoni and, if you're lucky, house-made sausage.

But that doesn't begin to describe the awesomeness of the crust, which, as with most pizza, is really what the bar pie at Star Tavern is all about.

Pizzas cooking on aluminum pans at Star Tavern in Orange, New Jersey.

Serious Eats / Adam Kuban

The uniquely crisp, crunchy, slightly chewy underbelly comes from a two-stage cooking process. The dough is first rolled and stretched onto an oiled pie plate from which all but the back lip has been cut off. During this stage, the bottom of the pizza begins to fry a bit, the oil working itself up into the crumb.

As soon as the pie is firm enough to move without losing its shape, it's slid off of the pan directly onto the floor of the gas oven, which I'm guessing runs at 550°F to 600°F—the pies take about 10 minutes to cook through.

A plain bar pizza at Star Tavern in Orange, New Jersey.

Serious Eats / Adam Kuban

This two-stage cooking method forms a deeply burnished, lightly charred, golden-brown crust that's a hybrid somewhere in the bottom of a New England Greek-style pan pizza, with its oil-soaked crust, and a New York–style gas-oven, thin crust, with its significant, crisp bottom. It's not greasy (unless you count the generously applied mozzarella), but there's a definite oiliness to it, with a structure that's firm enough to stand out straight when you grab a slice from its edge.

The other unique feature of the pie is its crustless edges: Cheese and sauce are applied all the way to the outer rim, even spilling off and coming into direct contact with the oven floor. The result is a crisp edge with a frico-like crunch. It's a really interesting alternative to a real end crust.

What's that? You don't live in Orange, New Jersey, and never intend on making a trip there even if there's awesome pizza involved? Not to worry, just keep reading.

The Ingredients

There's been a bit of debate about the makeup of the Star Tavern dough. On the Caramelized OpiNIONS blog, there's a recipe that supposedly comes from the Star Tavern's actual owner. The recipe contains a good deal of semolina flour, which didn't make much sense to me, because I certainly didn't taste it in the finished pies. Adam also straight-up asked owner Gary Vayianos about the semolina situation, and he confirmed that there is no semolina in the dough recipe.

For my sauce, I used my New York–style pizza sauce, which gets a flavor boost from a touch of butter. To match the smooth, easy-spread consistency of the Star Tavern sauce, I blended it for a few extra seconds with a hand blender after it was cooked. The cheese is applied in two steps. First, a bare dusting of grated aged Parmesan gets sprinkled over the sauce, followed by a pretty heavy layer of grated dry mozzarella. In due diligence, I made a couple tester pies using both straight-up bread flour, and bread flour cut with semolina. There's no question that the former was closer to what I had at Star Tavern.

That said, it wasn't exactly right. Given its proximity to New York, it's a good bet that their dough recipe is at least somewhere close to a New York–style pizza dough, which means a hydration of around 66%, the addition of oil to improve tenderness, and a slow rise. My regular New York–style dough recipe worked alright, but the pies were tougher than they should be. Switching bread flour out for regular all-purpose flour was the solution. All-purpose flour has a lower protein content than bread flour, thus forming a weaker gluten network and a more tender crust.

A bar-style pizza with shredded cheese on top, not cooked.

Just like with a regular New York–style pie, I found that the dough improves with a cold ferment—that is, a few nights of resting in the fridge to allow the yeast to slowly reproduce and digest starches, producing a slightly sweeter dough with a far more complex flavor and better browning qualities. One night was a minimum, with the dough reaching maximum flavor between three to five days of resting.

The beautiful thing about bar-style pies is that they're ridiculously easy to form. The thin, edgeless crust doesn't require the kind of gently hand-stretching that a New York or Neapolitan pie requires. In fact, peeking into the kitchen at Star Tavern, I noticed that they simply roll it out with a rolling pin, making this the ideal pie for even a total amateur to try their hand at.

A close up of cooked pepperoni bar pizza.

Serious Eats

I don't have custom-made aluminum baking dishes with built-in handles like the Star Tavern does, but I do have an aluminum pizza pan (you can get'em off Amazon), and it seems to work just as well for this application.

I knew that to get the right fried-charred texture, I'd have to follow their protocol, starting with a fry period on the aluminum, followed by a stop on a hot pizza stone. The question is: Where do I place the stone and the pie pan?

I'd already explored the best positioning for pizza stones in a regular oven, and how its placement can affect convection and radiation heating patterns, so I knew that to get the top and bottom to cook evenly, I'd want to place my oven all the way on the top rack, maximizing both radiative heat from the roof of the oven as well as convection heat from the air currents.

A diagram showing the heat and air current flow when the pizza stone is placed on the top oven rack.

Serious Eats

But placing the aluminum pan directly on the stone caused a problem: The bottom was cooking too fast. Because of the high thermal mass of the pizza stone and the high conductivity of aluminum, the bottom was frying much too fast. This is fine for a Neapolitan or New York-style pie in which you want very rapid and relatively uneven charring, but for these bar-style pies which should take 10 minutes to bake, you want slightly slower, more even browning to achieve the right texture.

There's no way I could raise the stone any more, so the solution turned out to be to start the pie on the rack below the pizza stone. By this method, the top of the pie still cooks relatively quickly due to the radiative heat emitted by the bottom of the pizza stone, while the bottom fries at a much gentler pace.

A pepperoni bar pizza, cooked, sliced and ready to serve.

Serious Eats

As soon as the pie is fried enough to be able to transfer it without breaking it (about five minutes or so), the rest is easy. Just slide it onto the stone, and cook until crisp and bubble with darkly charred edges.

A close-up side view of bar pizza, showing the very thin crust.

Serious Eats

Check out that nice crust! Thin, almost cracker-like, but with a distinct slightly chewy layer at the sauce-crust interface. I didn't go all out and make my own sausage for this pie (as Adam would've probably done), but I did top it with a few token slices of pepperoni, because that's what I had on hand in the fridge. In retrospect, I should have used far more than I did. Because of the relatively long cooking time, the pepperoni slices curl up into little cups with crisp edges—these are the best bites of the pie, in my humble opinion.

Showing the underside of a slice of bar pizza, with spots of charring.

Serious Eats

Here's the undercarriage, nice and brown.

The greatest thing about bar pizza is that it is, as Ed says, "a very forgiving style. Once you enter the realm of bar pizza, basically anything goes." You like cheddar cheese? Go for it. Prefer a sauce of fresh rather than cooked tomatoes? That's your prerogative too. Once you get the basic method down for achieving that perfectly crisp and crunchy chew, topping variations can be as wild or as tame as you'd like them to be.

This recipe was originally published as part of the column "The Pizza Lab."

April 2011

Recipe Details

Crispy Bar-Style Pizza

Prep 15 mins
Cook 35 mins
Active 60 mins
Rising Time 26 hrs
Total 26 hrs 50 mins
Serves 6 to 8 servings
Makes 4 pies

Ingredients

  • 18 ounces (about 3 3/4 cups) all-purpose flour

  • 1 tablespoon sugar

  • 0.25 ounce (about 2 teaspoons) salt

  • 1 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast

  • 2 tablespoons olive oil

  • 12 ounces lukewarm water

  • 1 tablespoon canola, grapeseed, or vegetable oil

  • 1 recipe New York-style pizza sauce, puréed with a hand blender or standing blender until smooth

  • 2 ounces finely grated parmesan

  • 1 to 1 1/2 pounds grated low-moisture mozzarella cheese

  • Toppings as desired

Directions

  1. Combine flour, sugar, salt, and yeast in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse 3 to 4 times until incorporated. Add olive oil and water. Run food processor until mixture forms a ball that rides around the bowl above the blade, about 15 seconds. Continue processing 15 seconds longer. Alternatively, combine ingredients in a stand mixer and mix on low speed for 10 minutes.

    Olive oil and water added to combined flour, sugar, salt, and yeast in food processor bowl

    Serious Eats / Julia Estrada

  2. Transfer dough ball to a lightly floured surface and knead once or twice by hand until a smooth ball is formed. Transfer to a gallon-sized zipper lock bag, seal, and place in the refrigerator. Allow to ferment for at least 1, and up to 5 days.

    Ball of dough transferred to a gallon-sized zipper lock bag

    Serious Eats / Julia Estrada

  3. At least 2 hours before baking, remove dough from refrigerator and divide into 4 even balls. Shape into balls by gathering dough towards the bottom and pinching shut. Flour well and place each one in a separate bowl (cereal bowls or small mixing bowls work well). Cover tightly with plastic wrap and allow to rise at warm room temperature until roughly doubled in volume.

    Pinching dough shut at bottom of the ball and dough placed into 4 separate bowls and covered tightly with plastic wrap

    Serious Eats / Julia Estrada

  4. Meanwhile, adjust oven rack with pizza stone to top position and place a second rack one position below it. Preheat oven to 550°F (290°C, or as hot as your oven will allow) for at least 1 hour.

    Oven rack with pizza stone in top position with a second rack placed one position below it

    Serious Eats / Julia Estrada

  5. Turn a single dough ball out onto floured surface. Use a rolling pin to roll it out into a 12-inch circle, lifting and stretching by hand if necessary. Grease an aluminum baking sheet with 1 tablespoon canola oil. Transfer dough to baking sheet. Spread about 1/2 cup of sauce evenly over entire surface of pie. Sprinkle with 1/4 of parmesan. Spread 1/4 of cheese in even layer over surface. Top with additional toppings as desired.

    Pizza dough topped with parmesan cheese, sauce, and shredded cheese

    Serious Eats / Julia Estrada

  6. Place in oven on rack immediately under the baking stone. Bake until edges are just beginning to brown, about 5 minutes. Remove from oven (close oven). Using a thin flexible metal spatula, carefully separate the pizza's edges from the pan (the pizza should slide around freely). Carefully slide pizza off of pan and onto baking stone. Continue baking until bottom is deep golden brown and cheese is melted and bubbly. Transfer pizza to a cutting board with a pizza peel. Cut into 8 slices, and serve. Repeat steps 5 and 6 with remaining pizzas.

    pizza transferred onto baking stone and a fully cooked pizza

    Serious Eats / Julia Estrada

Special Equipment

Food processor, pizza stone, aluminum pizza pan

Nutrition Facts (per serving)
535 Calories
22g Fat
58g Carbs
24g Protein
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Nutrition Facts
Servings: 6 to 8
Amount per serving
Calories 535
% Daily Value*
Total Fat 22g 29%
Saturated Fat 10g 51%
Cholesterol 55mg 18%
Sodium 1077mg 47%
Total Carbohydrate 58g 21%
Dietary Fiber 3g 11%
Total Sugars 5g
Protein 24g
Vitamin C 7mg 36%
Calcium 417mg 32%
Iron 4mg 21%
Potassium 358mg 8%
*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.)