Skip to main content

How to Reheat Pizza the Best Way

Maybe you’re the type who loves their day-old pizza straight from the fridge: cold, chewy, deliciously congealed. Yeah, who wouldn’t love that?

But for those who insist (rightfully) on reheating leftover pizza, the whole endeavor is designed to avoid those factors. And it’s harder than you think. A microwave will get your slice good and hot, but it turns your crust into rubber. An open skillet will help that crust crisp back up, but alas, the toppings will remain lukewarm at best.

To really enjoy your reheated pizza, you have to wait at least as long as you did for it to be delivered. Sorry, but it’s true. However, the rewards are well worth the patience. You get to savor your tasty slice just like you did when it came of the box—possibly even more so, since the flavors have had all that additional time to marinate.

margherita pizza paired with red wine
Richard Jung/Getty Images

Now that the weather is getting a little colder and the days are getting a little shorter, nailing the right way to reheat your pizza is only becoming more important. So get educated with our short, simple guide to reheating your pizza.

First, a Disclaimer

We at The Manual recognize that disparaging these alternate methods for reheating pizza may generate controversy and even trigger distress within our audience. For that reason, we offer these indisputable explanations for our stance on this controversial topic:

Why the Microwave Doesn’t Work

The small size and lack of ventilation in a microwave mean concentrated high heat on your pizza, without the necessary air circulation to evaporate the moisture being released. Instead, that moisture turns everything soggy and soupy. That’s why you can’t pick up a slice of microwaved pizza to eat it—the crust sags like a flag on a windless day. You need hot, dry air surrounding the slice to get it hot while still maintaining its structural integrity.

Why the Stovetop Doesn’t Work

Having your heat source underneath the slice means uneven cooking. All that heat is dissipating as it rises, meaning that your crust will be charred before your cheese reaches its melting point. (This is especially true for deep dish or Detroit-style pizza.) You could put a lid over the pan to trap the heat, but then you’re dealing with a similar situation to a microwave, soaking your pizza with moisture released by the heat.

Granted, there are numerous articles and forum threads on the internet that offer step-by-step instructions for “hacking” these pizza reheating methods in order to achieve satisfactory results. If you like babysitting your pizza and fiddling with extra steps every few minutes, have at it. Call us lazy, but we’re much more of the set-it-and-forget-it mindset. (Hey, it gives us more time to write entertaining and informative articles!)

If you, like us, prefer to putz around with other things during the 10-20 minutes it takes to achieve perfectly reheated pizza, go with the oven method. Knowing how little work you need to put in will make every savory mouthful that much better.

Recipe

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Place pizza slices right-side up on the pan. When oven is hot, insert pan and close the door completely, making sure oven door is fully sealed. Leave for 7-8 minutes. (If you’re heating just a slice or two, it should be done at 7 minutes. If you’ve got several slices in there or you’re dealing with a deep-dish variety, leave for the full 8 minutes. For very thin crust pizza, check for doneness at 6 minutes.)

And that’s it. No wrapping foil over the top, no transfers from stovetop to pan or vice versa, no ramekins of water heating alongside the pizza or other such shenanigans. Just simple, straightforward, second-day goodness.

Vorontsova Anastasiia/Shutterstock

So simple and straightforward, it might generate some controversy. We get it — you’ve read a million other articles telling you this process of reheating pizza is supposed to be complicated. Rather than argue the point, we invite you to try it for yourself — the proof of the reheated pizza is in the eating, after all. Try our ultra-simple pizza reheating recipe, and we’re sure you’ll love the results.

Extra Tips

Store your pizza properly

Your finished recipe is only as good as your ingredients. Sure, in this case the ingredients are already assembled, but it still matters how fresh they are when you embark on the reheating process. As tempting as it can be to toss a half-emptied pizza box into your fridge (especially if it’s late and you’re halfway through your second six-pack), do the responsible thing and wrap that pizza up in an air-sealed bag or a glass storage container, ideally with a layer of parchment paper or paper towel in between slices to prevent them from sticking together.

Preheat the pan

There’s no objective downside to putting your slice on a cold pan and popping it in the hot oven. Toppings will be piping hot, cheese will be gooey, and your crust will maintain its integrity. But if you’re craving a perfectly crisp crust, stick the pan into the oven while it’s warming, then pull it out, place your cold slice on it, and wait for the magic to happen.

Add a layer of parchment paper

Is there anything worse than opening the oven to find half of your extra cheese topping stuck to the pan? Avoid the cardinal sin of food waste by putting a sheet of parchment paper between your slice and the pan. (Don’t fall for the aluminum foil substitute, since cheese can stick to the foil just as easily as to a metal pan.)

Place the pan on the lowest oven rack

With the pan as low as possible in the oven, your slice will reheat from the bottom up, ensuring that your toppings don’t shrivel before your crust gets crisp.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Chelsea Batten
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Chelsea Batten is a writer, photographer, and Kerouac groupie. One of the original digital nomads, she was seduced from life…
How to break a fast — the best foods to eat
What to eat (and drink) when you're ready to chow down after a fast
Bowls of bone broth on a tray

Fasting has been a common practice for thousands of years in numerous cultures. In the last decade, the knowledge behind how to break a fast and intermittent fasting has become more well-known and used. Some people practice time-restricted eating. This involves limiting how many hours per day you can eat.
For example, 18/6 intermittent fasting would entail fasting for 18 hours per day, typically overnight, then doing all of your eating during a six-hour window in the daylight hours. In this scenario, you might have your first meal of the day at noon, finish your last meal at 6 p.m., and then fast overnight until the following day at noon. 
Other people practice alternate-day fasting, which essentially involves a 24-hour water fast followed by a full day of regular eating in a cyclical pattern. Others just do an occasional 24-hour fast when they feel comfortable doing so. As the name implies, this means you won't eat for a full 24-hour window. Keeping hydrated with water intake is always allowed in any safe fasting program.
When you're practicing intermittent fasting or engaging in occasional fasting, the focus is typically on getting through the fasting window until it's time to eat again rather than what you will actually eat when the fast has lifted.
What are the best foods to break a fast? Keep reading to find out.

Bone broth
Bone broth isn't particularly filling, so it might not be the most satisfying food to break a fast, but it’s often a great place to start. It's extremely easy to digest and high in some key nutrients your body needs after fasting.
For example, it's rich in electrolytes like potassium, sodium, magnesium, and calcium. Electrolytes are important minerals for all kinds of vital physiological processes, such as maintaining fluid balance, conducting nerve impulses, and initiating the contraction and relaxation of muscles. They also improve hydration and are required for the digestion and absorption of nutrients like carbohydrates.
After fasting, the main macronutrient the body needs is protein. Although there are storable forms of carbohydrates and fat in the body in muscle and liver glycogen and adipose (fat) tissue, the only protein storage is skeletal muscle. Prolonged fasting can break down muscle tissue because the body constantly needs protein for many basic functions and biochemical processes. When you’re fasting and not taking in any protein, your body has to break down muscle tissue to access the protein it needs to sustain normal life functions.
Many protein-rich foods, particularly animal flesh, are fairly hard to digest because the proteins have complex, three-dimensional structures that require much work to digest and absorb the individual amino acids. Bone broth is great for breaking a fast because the proteins are already partially broken down, reducing the work the body has to do on its own. The protein here is absorbed easily, particularly compared to the protein found in animal flesh; the long cooking process of bone broth partially degrades the protein into a more digestible form.
Additionally, much of the protein in bone broth is collagen. Collagen is the most abundant protein in the body and forms a structural component in everything from teeth and skin to muscles, cartilage, and tendons. The body can synthesize collagen by combining the amino acids proline and glycine in a synthesis process that requires vitamin C, zinc, and copper. However, eating foods rich in collagen negates the need for this process, allowing the protein to be readily available for use.
Try to eat natural, organic bone broth; homemade is best. Otherwise, look for pre-packaged organic bone broth without added cream, fat, or excessive salt. You can also simmer it with vegetables such as carrots, broccoli, and dark, leafy green vegetables to add more vitamins and minerals.

Read more
How to make the best spaghetti sauce, according to Jamie Oliver
Anybody can make a red sauce. Here, Jamie Oliver reveals how to make the best spaghetti sauce
Sunday gravy tomato sauce pasta pot

Spaghetti sauce is subjective stuff. Most who make batches claim their recipe is the best, thanks to a few extra ingredients or a few secrets they're unwilling to make public.

Regardless of how it's put together, it's impossible to go wrong with a good red sauce. As renowned chef Jamie Oliver says, the sauce serves as a lovely base atop which you can tinker and experiment. Once you get the gist of the sauce taken care of, you can spend the rest of the week fine-tuning and playing with various riffs on the traditional spaghetti. And for the record, Oliver's spaghetti sauce is arguably the best out there, for a couple of key reasons.

Read more
5 ways to reheat chicken wings without losing their flavor and texture
These bar food bad boys can be every bit as delicious the next day
Hot wings

All hail Teressa Bellissimo! If you truly consider yourself a chicken wing junkie, you'd know who that is. If not, you've probably guessed by now. Bellissimo was the inventor of the Buffalo wing, back in 1964. Wings have evolved a lot since then. Chefs have concocted creative sauces to coat them in and use other cooking methods like baking and air frying. You can get them naked or with batter, dry-rubbed or sauced, all drums or all flaps. Despite all the changes over the years, two things remain the same. First, they're delicious! Second, they should always be crispy on the outside and have a juicy, moist inside.

The one problem with this classic finger food is that it can be tricky to replicate the fresh-out-of-the-fryer taste with your leftovers. Although there's nothing wrong with eating a chicken wing cold and straight out of the fridge, it's best to enjoy them how Bellissimo intended them — out of respect. Luckily, there are a few ways to reheat chicken wings, even if you’ve only got a kitchenette to work with. Here’s our insider guide on how to reheat your leftover chicken wings without losing any flavor or desirable texture.

Read more