How to make pepperoni pizza in 15 minutes flat

This summer, I fell into a cooking rut. It was too hot to keep the windows open. Our grill was kaput. For weeks, the only recipes I felt like making involved zero cooking. I assembled salads. I made sandwiches. Until one day, when I had a craving for pizza.

Usually when I want pizza — and I’m not ordering delivery — I begin by stirring together the ingredients for homemade pizza dough before simmering canned tomatoes and aromatics into a simple sauce. But that day, with humidity nearing 70% and my patience for the chore of cooking at an all-time low, I decided to improvise.

I thought back to a J. Kenji López-Alt recipe on Serious Eats for what he called bar-style pizza. Instead of pizza dough, he uses a flour tortilla.

López-Alt’s recipe works. (No surprise there.) But his formula involves turning on your oven. I simply couldn’t bring myself to do that on such a hot day. So I decided to see what would happen if I cooked the whole thing in the skillet. To mimic the enclosed, radiating heat of an oven, I simply covered the pan tightly to heat everything through. To my surprise, it worked.

Instead of calling for store-bought or homemade pizza sauce, here I use tomato paste doctored with spices. It’s not the same as a from-scratch sauce made with canned tomatoes, but alongside the other components, it’s actually pretty good, considering how easy it is.

That’s partly because of the other major change I made: I precooked the pepperoni in the skillet before making the pizza. I’ve been a fan of pepperoni since I was a kid. Its flavor reminds me of trips to the mall, where a stop at Sbarro for a large triangular slice of pepperoni pizza was almost guaranteed. In this recipe, you start by heating a skillet. Once hot, add your pepperoni slices. Depending on the size of your pepperoni, you might want only a few or as many as a dozen. If you use pepperoni in a natural casing, it will curl up into upside-down cups in the pan as it releases some of its fat. The edges will get wonderfully crunchy as they cook.

Pull those out of the pan, and you’re left with a well-seasoned skillet in both senses of the term: greased and full of pepperoni flavor.

Now, add your pizza-sauce-covered tortilla. Sprinkle on some mozzarella cheese. Flip your pepperoni cups over and arrange them on top of the cheese. Cover the skillet tightly, then wait. Give the pizza a couple of minutes to cook before peeking at the bottom of the crust to be sure it’s not getting too dark. Adjust the heat if you need to, and keep cooking until the cheese is melted and has started to brown around the edge of the crust.

It will take only another minute or two, and then, look at that! You’ve got yourself a personal pan pizza. It’s not an artisanal Neapolitan-style pie with a bubbly, burnished crust. But it’s hot, crisp and fresh, and — this is key — it takes less time to make than getting delivery.

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Skillet Pepperoni Pizza

2 tablespoons tomato paste

1 teaspoon water

¼ teaspoon Italian seasoning

Pinch garlic powder

Pinch fine salt

One (8-inch) flour tortilla

10 to 12 small slices pepperoni in natural casing (about 1 ounce total)*

Packed ½ cup (2 to 3 ounces) shredded, part-skim mozzarella cheese

Heat a medium (10-inch) cast-iron skillet over medium heat for 1 to 2 minutes. Set a plate near your workspace.

Meanwhile, in a small bowl, stir together the tomato paste, water, Italian seasoning, garlic powder and salt until well combined.

Using the back of a spoon or an offset spatula, spread the sauce across the surface of one side of the tortilla, all the way to the edge.

Arrange the pepperoni slices in a single layer in the hot pan, and cook until some of the fat renders, the edges brown and the slices curl into upside-down cups, 1 to 3 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the pepperoni to the plate, leaving the rendered fat in the skillet.

Transfer the tortilla, sauce side up, to the skillet, and top with the mozzarella. Arrange the pepperoni on top of the cheese, then cover — with a lid, foil or sheet pan — and cook, peeking under the lid every so often to ensure the pizza is not burning, until the edges brown and the cheese melts, 2 to 4 minutes.

Slice, if desired, and serve hot. (If slicing before serving, you may want to do so on a cutting board.)

1 serving

*Note: If you don’t use pepperoni in a natural casing, it may not curl into cups, but the recipe will still work fine.

Substitutions: For tomato paste, use tomato puree or prepared tomato sauce. Pasta sauce is not recommended as it typically has a higher water content. Dislike pepperoni? Fry the pizza in olive oil and top it with whatever you’d like. For part-skim mozzarella, use whole-milk mozzarella, provolone or other shredded melting cheese. Vegan? Use nondairy cheese and vegan pepperoni, or skip the pepperoni and use just nondairy cheese.

Nutritional information per serving (makes one 8-inch pizza) | 453 Calories: 34g Carbohydrates, 65mg Cholesterol, 24g Fat, 1g Fiber, 27g Protein, 11g Saturated Fat, 1523mg Sodium, 5g Sugar

— G. Daniela Galarza