Grandma Pizza -- the Italian American Sheet Pan Classic

@iamjumo works in what looks like a commercial pizza kitchen, and in this video she makes a grandma pizza for the first time. She admits upfront she has never attempted one before, which makes the whole thing more interesting -- she is figuring out the technique in real time, narrating her decisions and second-guessing herself along the way.

Grandma pizza is an Italian American style closely related to Sicilian pizza. Both use a thick, oily dough pressed into a rectangular sheet pan. The main difference is assembly order and thickness. Grandma pizza is thinner than Sicilian, and the sauce typically goes on top of the cheese rather than underneath it.

The Method

The process starts with dough stretched into an oiled sheet pan. She drizzles a generous amount of olive oil across the surface of the pan before laying the dough down and pressing it out to the edges.

The cheese goes on first -- directly onto the raw dough. This is the defining move for grandma pizza and the part that made her nervous. Laying mozzarella straight on the dough before sauce means the cheese melts into the crust and creates a fused, crispy bottom layer rather than sitting on top of a sauce barrier.

Crushed tomato sauce gets spooned on top of the cheese in uneven dollops. She does not spread it into a smooth layer. The irregular sauce placement is intentional -- grandma pizza traditionally has visible patches of cheese between the sauce, giving each slice a different ratio of cheese to tomato.

She adds fresh parsley on top, acknowledging that parsley is not a standard grandma pizza topping. She knows it and does it anyway. A final drizzle of olive oil goes over the whole thing before it goes into the oven.

The finished pizza comes out with a golden, crispy bottom crust, melted cheese fused to the dough, and bright red sauce sitting on the surface. She tastes it and calls it the best pizza she has ever made. A second taster agrees.

Key Takeaways

• Grandma pizza is assembled cheese-first, sauce-on-top. That order is what separates it from most other pizza styles and creates the crispy cheese-crust bond on the bottom.
• The sauce stays in uneven dollops rather than a smooth spread. Each bite should hit a slightly different cheese-to-sauce ratio.
• Olive oil on the pan is not optional. The oil is what fries the bottom of the dough and gives grandma pizza its signature crunch.
• The style is forgiving for a first attempt. Even without prior experience, the sheet pan format and simple topping list make it hard to fail badly.