As with most of my kitchen experiments, this one started late at night. Thursday night at about 11 p.m. The idea was to make par baked mini pizza crusts that I could crank out in a big batch and throw into the freezer for quick snacks. But here’s the twist: I wanted to bake them sandwiched in between two cupcake pans to act as both a press and a mold in the shaping/proofing and baking stages to theoretically end up with sturdy, crusty cups for filling and eating. Sounds simple, right?

I didn’t have two identical cupcake pans with standard size cups. So I hit Walmart and grabbed two six cup nonstick pans which were dirt cheap. (Mainstays brand - $1.99 each!) The smaller size of the pans would come in handy in the dough pressing to provide the entire pan with even pressure.

Also, I thought I might have to adjust my go-to pizza dough recipe for this process. My instincts said that I should add a tiny bit of olive oil to the batch to give it a little more moisture and make sure that the cups didn’t stick to the pans or each other. And it turns out, that was correct. Also, I substituted All Purpose Flour for my usual 00 pizza flour. The gluten percentage in 00 flour ranges from 11-13% gluten and APF typically is between 10-12%. There’s enough overlap in those ranges that the difference would be negligible. No need to reinvent the wheel for some snacks. Here’s my standard pizza dough recipe with the addition of the olive oil and the APF.

Deep Dish Pizza Dough Cups

500g All Purpose Flour (approx 4 cups)

2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp instant yeast

1 Tbsp olive oil

300ml warm water (approx 1-1/4 cups)

Two same size metal standard cupcake pans (preferrably non-stick)

Cooking spray

1. Place all the dry ingredients into the bowl of a stand mixer outfitted with dough hook and stir a couple times to distribute the ingredients.

2. Start the mixer on slow/stir and add the olive oil and then add the water. When dough starts to get shaggy, increase the mixer speed to medium and set a timer for 8 minutes.

3. When time is up, turn off the mixer and remove bowl. Give your bottom cupcake pan a quick mist of cooking spray and the same to the underside of the second pan.

4. Using a quarter cup measure, scoop up balls of dough, roll them lightly between your palms and place dough balls into the cups of the prepared cupcake pan. You should have dough balls that weigh roughly 1.5 oz (approx 45g) and this batch will make 18 dough balls. Cover the cupcake pan with plastic wrap and let the dough balls rise for one hour. If you don’t have more than two pans, cover the mixing bowl again to keep the dough from drying out until you make the second batch.

Pressing and baking

5. After an hour, check the dough to see if it has almost doubled in size, reaching almost to the rim of the pan. If it hasn’t, give it another 15-30 minutes. Preheat oven to 425°F.

6. After the dough balls have risen, the gluten should be relaxed enough for pressing. Take the second pan (the “press pan”), place it on top of the first pan and start pressing it down it down lightly and turn the pan around and look in the gap to make sure that the dough is squeezing up out of the cups evenly. Keep pressing down, and if you have to wiggle the press pan around a little bit to even out the dough cups, that’s okay. You should end up with the rims of both pans almost touching, with some dough almost peeking out from the edges of the pan. Don’t remove the press pan. Put both pans with dough sandwiched in between (a panwich?) into the oven for 6-7 minutes.

7. Remove pan from oven and let it cool for a couple minutes and then remove the press pan. The cups should be very pale and with almost no browning. Let cups cool completely and then stack them into a gallon size freezer bag and place into the freezer. They’ll keep for about 6 months.

Filling and Final Bake

8. Fill with whatever your pizza lovin’ heart desires. Line ’em up on a baking sheet and bake/air fry at 425°F for 7-8 minutes until the edges and bottom of the crust are browned. Remove, eat and weep with joy.

9. Disclaimer: Please let your deep dish pizza cups cool for a couple minutes after removing from the oven. Straight out of the oven, they are like a cup of Mozzarella Magma.

With my first batch of the cups, I was a little put off at the blobby corners of the outer crusts. BUT, as it turned out, this was a total gift from the food gods. Those corners make sturdy handles to pick them up for eating. We did an assortment of fillings for the first test batch: Broccoli and Cheese, Hawaiian, Tuna Melt (tuna salad and cheddar - no sauce) and loaded one up with extra gooey Mac and Cheese w/ crumbled bacon. Today, it was Steak Taco pizza filling, and that was pretty stellar, too. My roomie has eaten six of these minis since Friday, my lawn guy gobbled down another three, and I have eaten more than I care to admit (approximately 126 calories per crust - not including the fillings).

Come to think of it, these might actually be good as a bread bowl for soup; no reason why you couldn’t brown them in the oven, then fill them with a chunky stew. Maybe a top-down pot pie? Chopped salad bowl? Run with it, have fun with it.

Rich Swanson is a local cook who has had numerous wins in nationally sponsored recipe contests. He is also the layout specialist here at The Day.

Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Rich Swanson can be reached at TheSurlyTable@gmail.com