Baking Pizza in a Home Oven
Discussion started by Dennis Hackethal
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas, and submit new ideas.Iteratively improving on pizza at home. Inspired by itsdoughguy on Instagram but mistakes are my own.
Ingredients
- Store-bought dough (1 pound)
- Crushed tomatoes (100g)
- Mozzarella (whole milk, shredded, 150g)
Then, for garnish:
- Oregano
- Fresh basil leaves
- 3-4 dashes of salt
Steps
- Preheat oven for 1 hour. Ends up somewhere between 450 and 500°F.
- Preheat pizza steel for 1 hour on gas range (biggest burner). Reached about 565°F in the center.
- Rest dough at room temperature for about 50 min.
- Stretch the dough.
- Add tomato sauce.
- Add cheese.
- Dust the pizza peel with flour and place pizza on peel.
- Place pizza on steel and put in oven.
- Bake for about 5 minutes.
- Move to bottom rack, bake for 3 more minutes.
The main challenge with baking pizza at home is that home ovens don’t get hot enough for the dough to bake properly. The pizza steel is supposed to help with that.
Results (markedly better than last time):
Presumably, I need to get the oven hotter. I could try moving the steel right underneath the broiler while preheating.
I have since bought a thermometer gun so this will be easier to figure out.
In #1535, I learned that my steel reaches around 620°F under the broiler. That’s plenty hot to make pizza at home.
Might be better if I made my own dough.
Adding more salt as a ‘topping’ helped improve the taste of the pizza overall. Decent workaround for now.
The toppings were done cooking much faster than the dough and started burning a bit toward the end.
Next time, I could turn the broiler off. And if I have the steel on the top rack, I could maybe move it to the middle, but that could take time and let too much hot air out of the oven.
Preheating the pizza steel on the gas burner possibly got the temperature up but it created an unevenness. The center of the steel was apparently much hotter than the rest, which is why the center of the pizza cooked faster (visible both on top and underneath).
The center lifted up while cooking, which is presumably why the leopard print is missing in the center.
Once I have the thermometer gun, I can compare the temperatures for preheating the steal on the burner vs oven, and how much the temperatures vary across the steel surface for each approach.
Some burnt undercarriage. I don’t think it was because of the (possibly) increased heat but because I didn’t dust off the flower like I did last time.
The crust was nice and crispy.