All of this was news to me...
"In pizza heaven, it is always 950 degrees. The temperature required to make an authentic Neapolitan pizza is stupidly, unbelievably hot—more blast furnace than broiler. My backyard pizza oven can get all the way there in just 15 minutes. Crank it to the max, and the Ooni Koda will gurgle up blue flames that bounce off the top of the dome. In 60 seconds, raw dough inflates into pillowy crust, cheese dissolves into the sauce, and a few simple ingredients become a full-fledged pizza...The traditional home oven is great for lots of things: chocolate-chip cookies, Thanksgiving turkeys, roasted brussels sprouts, whatever. Pizza is not one of them. Let’s consider a classic New York pie, which doesn’t require the same extreme heat as its Neapolitan brethren. It sounds weird, but you want the pie to be medium rare. The crust should be crispy but still pliable, the cheese melted but not burned. The only way to achieve that is to blast pizza dough with heat from both top and bottom—about 600 degrees at the very least, preferably 650. But nearly every kitchen range tops out at 550 degrees...Overcoming the limitations of the reviled kitchen range has long stumped homemade pizza enthusiasts. Julia Child laid out tiles in her oven to soak up the oven’s heat and transfer it to the crust for extra crispiness. That inspired the pizza stone, an oversize ceramic tile that you insert into your oven...Before making pizza, some recipes suggest that you should leave your oven at full heat for 45 minutes, or an hour, or even two... Even if your oven reaches 750 degrees, its walls “are not going to be as thick as the walls of a commercial pizza oven.. So there’s just less heat energy trapped in there..."
The discussion continues at The Atlantic.
For those who don't want to/can't buy their own pizza oven and are stuck with a regular stove:
ReplyDeleteIf you use a pizza stone, and you should, leave it in the oven as hot as you can for at least 45-60 minutes. Should you make more than one pizza, then give it time to reheat. Putting the dough on the stone will cool it.
Experiment with making/buying dough. It will take a few rounds to get it right. One supermarket's pizza dough is NOT the other supermarket's pizza dough. Frozen dough is fine. Let it thaw all day.
It pays to pre-bake your dough, then add toppings and then stick it back in. It's just too hard for a puny 450F over to get through all the toppings and bake the dough.
Also, don't try to make pizza stone sized pizzas. You will drop them because your kitchen is simply not large enough to handle those big pizzas. Just make two halves and save yourself from cleaning turned over pizza from the ground. As with peanut butter sandwiches, they always go toppings down.
Finally, keep your oven clean. Clean up those crumbs and that cheese that fell off. My indoor air filter goes nuts every time the oven is on, even though I try to keep it quite clean. Your oven is filthy, even if you can't smell it.
Remember: Home made pizza is always the best because it's made with love.
My oven, 900 mm wide, glass door, electric, with 6 burner gas hob on top, tops out at 400, but I have never had it past 350.
ReplyDeleteAll these claims of 500, and 600, and even 950 degrees !!!
But then I live in most of the world.
Lots of foods come out best, or at least in a distinctive and unfamiliar way, if cooked in an extremely hot oven for a shorter time -- in some cases, very short indeed. There was a restaurant in my city in the 1980s that stoked a wood oven to a claimed 1200F (or was it 1500F?) and ran steaks and chops through in something like 60 seconds. They are, of course, no longer in business -- not due to the recent, ongoing industry apocalypse, but longer ago, because of increasing concern about the safety of the employees. The "tandoori" craze was anther example of the same principle. I would be astounded if any commercial pizza kitchen anywhere around here came anywhere close to 950F.
ReplyDeleteI worked at a local pizza restaurant one summer. They ran their oven at 700. One night we had a power failure but were able to continue cooking pizzas for another hour or so, until the oven temp dropped to 450-ish and cooking time became too long. (Cook time was about 6 minutes at 700 degrees.)
ReplyDeleteI can vouch for the Ooni Koda. Makes an amazing pizza in under 2 minutes. They also publish recipes. I use their basic dough and sauce recipes. Simple and delish.
ReplyDeleteI've never had Neapolitan pizza so I don't really know what I'm missing out, but I've made pizza with MANY different kinds of oven over the last 35 years (had a GF get me into making them in my 20s - oh, what I considered pizza back then compared to now is worlds apart).
ReplyDeleteI know that the hottest oven I had was probably a modded Ferrari G3 that would cook a pizza in around a minute and a half, but never perfectly. The crust had a snap to it but was pillowy inside. Probably pretty close to Neapolitan. With ring elements top and bottom the very outside of the crust, the rim, was never as crisp.
I've not real interest in the outdoor ovens, but the Ooni Volt indoor electric oven intrigued me, except at a grand it was a bit rich for my blood. I bought a commercial Chinese made pizza oven for a couple hundred quid that would get a 14" pizza to 350C/660F but it looked atrocious and some of those stainless steel edges you could shave with.
Eventually bought a Unold electric oven for a sane £250 (often cheaper now). 12" pizzas to 400C/750F. Will cook a "New York" style pizza in 3 minutes. Not that I've ever had a New York pizza. I doubt New York pizza could even match up to my home made ones. I have special water. I jest, but I definitely make better pizza than anything I've ever had locally.
My mom made very good square pizza in a cookie pan at 350F. Maybe better tasting than pizza place pizza.
ReplyDeletei knew of this from talking to the owner of our italian restaurant of choice when i was little, and then later from kenji lopez-alt’s pizza lab articles where the hows and whys got hammered into a bit more shape. (https://www.seriouseats.com/the-pizza-lab-three-doughs-to-know)
ReplyDeletealso from lopez-alt: a recipe for sicilian-style pizza that works remarkably well in a home oven (in part by letting the dough rise on its own instead of letting the oven’s heat power it, and using ample amounts of olive oil in the square tray to improve heat transfer). the sauce especially is as close to a religious experience as i ever got. i regularly have to make extra because it mysteriously vaporises between preparing it and putting it on the pizza. (https://www.seriouseats.com/sfincione-sicilian-new-years-pizza-with-bread)
raphael
I ran a medium-sized stone oven at a resort for several years, so I can confirm they are hot. They are so hot. They are so much hotter than you think. At optimal heat and with a good fire going, the fancy Italian pyrometer read in the 850° range for air temperature. Infrared thermometer said the floor was a toasty 1000°. At temperatures like that cooking becomes equal parts instinctual and acrobatic. You have to know from the feel of the dough how evenly it will rise, how quickly it will blister and burn, and whether it can be stretched nearly transparent without drying into a cracker. You toss a pinch of semolina on the floor to gauge from the smoke whether the floor must be cooled with a sacrificial dough before the genuine article goes in. You reach elbow-deep into the hellfire to turn each delicate, circular gift based on the slightest signs and pure feeling. Any mistake at any step destroys the pizza and you must clean the floor of the oven and start again. I've worked in many restaurants and every station of a kitchen since then and that remains the purest cooking experience of my life.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing that cool story.
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