Or you can invert a half sheet pan and roll your pizza out on that. It transfers heat so well you don’t really need to maneuver a pizza from a peel. Just use the back of the pan to assemble and put in hot oven.
I’ve used a stone for year and this works much better for me at home oven temps.
But if you really want a steel. Save some bucks and look for steel metal places and have them cut up a section as large as you want…bonus, put on a grill and you have a Japanese steakhouse tempanyaki grill.
I can’t see how that would be similar at all. The baking sheet still needs to warm up. Putting a cold sheet in the oven vs dropping your pizza on a 500F hot piece of steel?
As someone that has both: I recommend the stone for the Kamado. But be sure you start the kamado very slowly before opening the dampers. I’ve cracked my stone by under estimating just how quickly and how hot the Kamado can get.
You’ve got the steel too low. Once the oven is up to temperature and you put the pizza in, you’re supposed to turn on the broiler -which works best if it’s within a few inches of the food. Keep your stone on the bottom, or bottom rack as a heat sink to regulate temperature. But, the steel is supposed to be on the top rack.
There actually is a qualitative difference. You’ll get better heat transfer without the paper (more char on the crust) and when you roll out the dough instead of stretching it, you squeeze out a lot of air pockets which is why the pizza in that article looks so flat. I like a thin, semi-charred crust with puffy pockets on the edge. To each their own.
Excellent. Thanks for the advice!
If thermal conductivity was the main goal then an aluminum or copper sheet would be far better. Copper has twice the conductivity of aluminum, which in turn has 5 times the conductivity of carbon steel (like Jason’s sheet).
The results are similar. Also…when I put the pan in the oven I raise the temp a bit so the lower element comes on and radiant heat transfers pretty well on a sheet pan. My sheet pans aren’t airbake type thing but just standard stuff with lip—not cookie sheets, not thick at all. Try it and see if it works for you it really helps with not heating up your kitchen and using power for 30 mins preheating a stone or steel.
Also I use the 00 flour with 1 cup 00 flour and 2 cups bread flour…1 cup water ratio. That’s worked better for me than pure 00 flour----which tends to like a superhot baking temp.
I actually just put mine directly on the grill. Banked coals and whatnot.
Pizza places commonly use a dough roller, they just let it rise a second time. I sent the article along more for your use as to grilling on a Kamodo instead of dough creation.
If you really want pizza parlor style pizza, you’re going to have to start with an oven that you can crank up to 700°. These gimmicks may help a little, but you’ll never achieve what you’re really after, with an oven that only goes to 500°.
I’ve had them made that way. Pretty de-lish actually.
I got a steel a few weeks ago, have made about 4-5 pizzas since then, definite improvement over the pizza stone I had before, chewier texture, puffier edges, but still crisp and thin on the base. Dough recipe I’m using is from the Franco Manca cookbook (a neapolitan style pizza place in London), must try a few other recipes too. Cooking time is around 4-5 mins after preheating for an hour in my fan-assisted 250 degree oven (using an infrared thermometer the steel gets to between 280-300 degrees, it’s not uniform).
Here’s one of them:
Thanks for the dough resipe.
Cheers!
Another tip: put your oven in convection mode if you can!
Exactly zero Neapolitan pizza joints cook on steel. Reckon why that is?
Because they have brick wood/coal fired ovens which most home cooks do not?
interesting… does it actually help? I put my stone on the top rack, away from the direct heat at the bottom and allowing for the convection on top to brown the top. I like my cheese pretty dark, but then crusts still seem to get a bit more done than I would like. would turning on the convection bake more evenly distribute the heat? If so, do you need to move the stone to the middle rack then…?
You dropped your salad on your pizza?
Copper would be great, you could probably even use something thinner than 1/4". Issue is price. A 12" x 12" copper plate 1/4" thick is going to cost you over $160.
And their brick ovens are running 800 F. So they don’t need the speed of transfer from steel since temp is higher. Also ALL pizza places that use non-brick ovens are baking on steel.
