Old Forge Pizza: Coal Country's Prebaked Tray Pizza

Old Forge, in Lackawanna County, has a lot of pizzerias for a town its size, and nearly all of them make the same kind of pizza. Ken Forkish counted about twenty; Modernist Pizza says about a dozen in one place and about half a dozen “pizza cafes” in another. Either way, the town has organized its identity around pizza, and there’s a lingo to go with it: a whole pizza is a tray, and a slice is a cut.

What Old Forge pizza is

• The crust. Thick, soft and white-bread-like, made from a sweetened dough and baked in standard sheet pans. Forkish notes it’s crisp underneath because of the layer of fat or oil under the dough.
• The shell. The crust is parbaked before the cheese goes on. Modernist Pizza reports that this is what Old Forge pizzaioli call a shell.
• The sauce. Forkish describes it as having onions in it, and the published Old Forge-style recipe from Tony Cirimele of New Columbus Pizza Co. grates a sweet onion into the sauce.
• The cheese. Modernist Pizza describes provolone, often combined with American cheese, and says many places use processed cheese or their own blends. Forkish puts it more simply: there are “no rules about the cheese.” Cirimele’s published blend is 60% whole-milk mozzarella, 20% brick or white cheddar and 20% white American, so a provolone-and-American blend is common rather than universal.
• The toppings. A short list. When the Modernist Pizza team visited, it was sausage, peppers, onions, pepperoni and, to their surprise, shrimp.

The Modernist Pizza authors weren’t won over. They compared it to elementary school cafeteria pizza, “albeit much browner,” but credited the parbaked shell with something many thicker pizzas get wrong.

Red and white

Most people order red: tomato sauce and cheese on the parbaked shell.

White is a different construction. Modernist Pizza describes it as a sheet-pan-sized calzone or turnover, typically filled with just cheese, or cheese and cooked broccoli, and locals sometimes call it a double-crust pizza. Both are sold by the tray or by the cut.

Where it came from

Nobody can document how it started. The story most often told, which Modernist Pizza repeats while noting it lacks documentation, is that in the 1920s or ’30s, while the men worked in the coal mines, women ran speakeasies where the miners came to eat, drink and play cards, and one of them, known as Grandma Ghigiarelli, made a pan-baked pizza for a crowd of hungry miners. Her café operated until 2017, but her 1959 obituary doesn’t mention pizza.

The documented record starts later. The earliest evidence of pizza in Old Forge that the Modernist Pizza team found was a newspaper ad from 1942, and they found a 1962 ad for Arcaro & Genell, which was still operating when they visited. The town seems to have started calling itself the pizza capital of the world in the 1960s, as it struggled after mill and factory closures. About 40% of the community claims Italian heritage, and the pizzerias are known for helping each other out, lending cheese, sauce and dough when one runs short.

Why the shell matters

Look at a slice of thick pizza from the side and you’ll often see a pale, gummy line between the crust and the sauce. Modernist Pizza calls it the gel layer: the top of the dough stays undercooked because wet sauce keeps it cool while the rest of the crust bakes. They measured it in an experiment with 120 pizzas and concluded that the only way to eliminate it completely is to prebake the dough. Old Forge red, they note, avoids the gel layer by doing exactly that.

For more on why it happens, see starch gelatinization and how to fix a soggy pizza bottom.

Old Forge and Sicilian

Both are rectangular pan pizzas, so Old Forge often gets filed under Sicilian. They’re made differently:

For the Sicilian side, see Sicilian vs. grandma pizza. Another Pennsylvania square pie with processed cheese is Altoona-style pizza.

Making Old Forge-style pizza at home

This makes one red tray in a 13 × 18-inch half-sheet pan, cut into 12. It’s adapted from the Old Forge-style recipe Tony Cirimele of New Columbus Pizza Co. published in PMQ Pizza Magazine (checked October 14, 2026), which uses a 24-ounce dough ball, 10 ounces of sauce and 10 to 11 ounces of cheese in an 11 × 17-inch pan. The half-sheet pan is the adaptation. It has 234 square inches against 187, so every amount below is multiplied by 1.25 (234 ÷ 187 = 1.251) and rounded. His 1% fresh yeast is converted to instant yeast at one-third the weight, the Pizza Planner’s conversion.

Time: about 45 minutes of active work. Cirimele’s dough stages add up to about 5 to 6 hours: 8 to 10 minutes of mixing, 3 to 4 hours of bulk fermentation, an hour as a ball and 45 minutes in the pan (calculated). He gives no times for the last rise or for either bake, so neither does this page.

Dough (about 848 g)

His 24-ounce (680 g) ball × 1.25 comes to about 851 g; the rounded weights above add up to 848 g (calculated). Plus vegetable or olive oil for the pan. Cirimele doesn’t call for oil in the pan, but Forkish notes that the layer of fat or oil under the dough is what crisps an Old Forge bottom.

Sauce (about 350 g)

Cirimele’s sauce is a batch for a #10 can of crushed tomatoes, about 3 kg, with a grated sweet onion, 1½ tablespoons of minced garlic, a tablespoon each of crushed basil, sugar and black pepper, ¾ tablespoon of sea salt and a teaspoon of oregano. His 10 ounces per tray × 1.25 is about 355 g, so this is roughly a tenth of his batch, rounded (calculated):

• 320 g canned crushed tomatoes
• About 30 g sweet onion, grated
• ½ teaspoon minced garlic
• ¼ teaspoon each crushed basil, sugar, sea salt and black pepper
• A pinch of dried oregano

Stir it together. About 100 g goes on the dough before the shell bake (his 3 ounces × 1.25 is about 106 g), and the rest goes on after.

Cheese (375 g)

• 225 g whole-milk mozzarella, shredded
• 75 g brick cheese or white cheddar, shredded
• 75 g white American cheese from the deli, torn into small pieces

That’s Cirimele’s 60/20/20 blend at 375 g, inside his 10 to 11 ounces × 1.25, or 355 to 390 g (calculated). For something closer to the provolone-and-American blends Modernist Pizza describes in Old Forge, swap in mild provolone with some white American for the same total; that’s an adaptation, not part of his recipe.

Method

1. Mix. Stir the salt, sugar and yeast into the water until fully mixed, then add the flour and oil. Mix for 8 to 10 minutes.
2. Bulk fermentation. Cover and leave at room temperature for 3 to 4 hours.
3. Ball and rise. Shape the dough into one ball, cover and let it rise for another hour.
4. Pan it. Oil the half-sheet pan. Put the dough in, cover and rest 45 minutes, then stretch it into the corners. Leave it covered to keep rising until you bake. Cirimele notes that you can also wrap and refrigerate the panned dough for later.
5. Sauce and preheat. Stir the sauce ingredients together. Heat the oven to 500°F (260°C).
6. Bake the shell. Spread about 100 g of the sauce thinly over the dough and bake at 500°F until the shell is 60 to 70 percent cooked. That’s Cirimele’s only cue; he gives no time. The shell should be set but well short of done, since it bakes again.
7. Cool. Take the shell out and let it cool.
8. Top. Spread the rest of the sauce over the shell and cover it with the cheese blend.
9. Second bake. Return it to the oven and bake until done. Cirimele gives no time or cue for this bake either, so look for melted cheese with a few golden spots and an underside that’s golden-brown when you lift a corner.
10. Cut. Cut into 12 rectangles, 3 by 4, and serve by the cut.

Sources

• Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, Modernist Pizza (2021), volume 1, page 66 (origin stories, Grandma Ghigiarelli, the 1942 ad), page 121 (the shell, red and white, cheese and toppings), page 249 (the town, the 1962 Arcaro & Genell ad, the “pizza capital” name) and pages 370–371 (the gel layer).
• Ken Forkish, The Elements of Pizza (2016), chapter 1: Old Forge trays, the oil under the dough, the onions in the sauce and the cheese.
• Tony Cirimele, New Columbus Pizza Co., “The Pizza Kitchen: Old Forge Style Pizza,” PMQ Pizza Magazine (March 30, 2019; checked October 14, 2026): dough formula and process times, pan and portion sizes, sauce, cheese blend, and the shell parbaked at 500°F to 60 to 70 percent cooked.
• King Arthur Baking, “Sicilian-Style Pizza”: the Sicilian-style comparison.
• Pan areas, the 1.25 scaling, the rounded weights, the one-tray sauce and the yeast conversion are calculated.