Best Way To Reheat Pizza

Pizza is my friend. It’s a well known fact that Pizza and I have been besties for a very long time. When I was in high school, I would walk into our local pizzeria, Laura’s Pizza Den and the pizza man would say to me, “Hello Mr. Tripodi, one plain and one Sicilian coming up”. It used to amaze my friends. But I went there all the time and they got to know me. So of course I know the Best Way To Reheat Pizza.

And once during a weekend visit to Newport, Rhode Island many years ago, I ate 34 slices of pizza. Not all once, it was over the whole weekend but I’m still proud of that accomplishment. It wasn’t an eating contest or anything like that. It was just that I love pizza and I ate it for most of the meals that weekend.

So if you want to know how to reheat a slice a pizza, you’ve come to right place. Everyone knows that reheating it in the toaster oven or microwave just makes for mushy pizza. The crust kind of steams or something and it gets soggy and it’s nothing like right out of the pizza oven. Sure it’s still good enough to eat (especially if it’s late night) but doesn’t have that fresh from the pizzeria taste.

Now if you had a pizza stone and a very hot oven, you can heat up a leftover slice pretty well. But it takes too long for a pizza stone to get hot. Like at least a 1/2 hour to get optimum results with the crust. If you want a quick slice, this will not work out too well for you.

I’d love to have a wood fired pizza oven in my backyard and someday i think I will. But today is not that day. Building an outdoor pizza oven is an expensive and time consuming project.

leftover pizza folded — Fold the tip over to protect the cheese before placing in the panini press

leftover pizza panini — Place the slice in a preheated panini press

So the easiest way to reheat pizza at home is to use your panini press. Since I am the author of the Everything Panini press cookbook, I’ve tried just about everything on a panini press. And something about the hot grill plates just locks in the flavor and heats up the crust to that original pizzeria texture.

reheated leftover pizza slice — Eat as is or slice into strips & dunk in tomato sauce

The best way to do it is to take two slices and place them on top of each other. Cheese side facing cheese side and crusts on the outside facing the panini press grill plates. 2-4 minutes later and you have a real pizza panini. The cheese and sauce are sealed inside two pizzeria quality crusts. Take a pizza wheel and slice them into strips and you can even dunk them into small bowl of pizza sauce. If you only have one slice, then fold the tip over the crust like I did in the pictures on this page. Panini pizza is just about as close as you’re going to get to reheating your leftover pizza to it’s original quality.

So if you are looking for the best way to reheat pizza, and if you don’t have a pizza stone or a backyard pizza oven, then go with the panini press.