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Kitchen & Cooking

You can make pizza in a slow cooker—here's how

Pizza pie in a pot? You heard that right.

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Here at Reviewed, we discovered a new, easy way to get your pizza fix. Hint: it’s not delivery and it’s certainly not DiGiorno—it’s slow cooker deep dish pizza.

We were skeptical at first when we found the recipe from A Spicy Perspective, but to our surprise, the outcome was not only delicious, but it was easy to make as well. The cook time is longer than your traditional pie, but in the end, it’s cheaper, customizable and just as tasty. Perfect for a lazy day, football game, pizza night and more.

Intrigued like we were initially? Here’s how you can make pizza in the slow cooker at home.

What you need:

  • At least a 6-quart slow cooker. We used a 6-quart oval cooker, though a circular one should work fine as well.
  • Enough parchment paper to cover the inside of your slow cooker.
  • Enough flour to roll out your dough.
  • Cornmeal to sprinkle on both sides of the dough.
  • Fresh or frozen (and defrosted) dough.
  • Lots of cheese. We used a full bag of Italian blend.
  • Pizza/tomato sauce.
  • Any other toppings (cooked meat, veggies, etc.) you want. We used pepperoni.

How to do it:

1. Roll the dough

We laid out a piece of parchment paper and sprinkled it with flour and cornmeal to help roll the dough out. Once the dough was down, we rolled it into an oval, since we had an oval slow cooker. One thing we made sure to do was to roll it bigger than the bottom of the pot so that the sides could fold up for the deep dish style.

How to make slow cooker pizza
Credit: Mike Roorda/Reviewed

How to make slow cooker pizza: Rolling the dough

2. Pop it in the "oven"

Once both sides were sprinkled with cornmeal and rolled out evenly, we lifted the parchment paper and carefully placed the paper (with the dough on it) into the slow cooker. We then removed any excess parchment paper that stuck out of the bowl of the cooker.

How to make slow cooker pizza
Credit: Mike Roorda/Reviewed

How to make slow cooker pizza: Placing the dough

3. Make the deep dish

To start forming the pizza, we pressed the dough evenly into the sides of the slow cooker creating a bowl shape, then added a layer of cheese. We used nearly the entire bag, but that is up to you.

4. Add the toppings

We then stretched the dough up the sides of the cooker even more and added pepperoni. This would be where any other toppings could be added.

How to make slow cooker pizza
Credit: Mike Roorda/Reviewed

How to make slow cooker pizza: The toppings

5. Sauce it up

After that came the sauce, which we poured over the cheese and pepperoni and used a spoon to evenly distribute it, making sure none got on the crust part of the dough to make it soggy. We added some extra cheese on top, too.

How to make slow cooker pizza
Credit: Mike Roorda/Reviewed

How to make slow cooker pizza: Pre-baking

6. Shut the lid

Once the pizza was constructed, we covered the slow cooker with a paper towel and put the lid on top of that to keep the lid from dripping on the pie.

7. Heat the "oven"

We set the pizza to cook on high for four hours, but the recipe says 2-4 hours, or 4-6 hours on low.

8. Check the pie

After two hours, check the pizza to see if it’s done. If the crust is golden brown, not spongy and up to your standards, carefully remove it using the ends of the parchment paper. We checked after three hours and the crust was starting to burn and get a little too hard, so we removed it.

How to make slow cooker pizza
Credit: Mike Roorda/Reviewed

How to make slow cooker pizza: The cooked pizza

9. Chow down

Take the pizza off the parchment paper, cut and enjoy! The best part is, there should be minimal mess in the bottom of the slow cooker.

How to make slow cooker pizza
Credit: Mike Roorda/Reviewed

How to make slow cooker pizza: Taking a slice

Tips for your at-home pizzeria

How to make slow cooker pizza
Credit: Mike Roorda/Reviewed

How to make slow cooker pizza: The final product

  • If you can, make sure you have a second set of hands around for when you lift the dough into the slow cooker. It took us a couple of tries with one person to get the parchment paper and dough perfectly into the pot.
  • We added cheese on the top and it burnt a little and added nothing, so if you're going true Chicago style, don't add cheese on top. Maybe just sprinkle some parmesan.
  • Like we stated above, the cooking part comes down to your preference, your slow cooker and monitoring it to make sure nothing gets overcooked. Our pizza came out good, but if we had checked and taken it out a half hour earlier, it may have been even better.
  • If we did it again, we’d try mixing some more meat and/or veggies in, which could also affect cooking time.

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