Baking Pizza in a Home Oven
Showing only ideas leading to #1507 and its comments.
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.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):
The dough was bland and not very crispy.
Describing it as “not very crispy” is vague. That could mean it was too soft or too hard. In reality, it was too hard.
Superseded by #1542. This comment was generated automatically.
Presumably, I need to get the oven hotter. I could try moving the steel right underneath the broiler while preheating.
I now think that heat wasn’t that big of a problem; I believe I overcooked the dough.
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.
I don’t think I’m ready for that. It’s an added difficulty, another task to master; let’s get the other stuff right first. Once I’ve gotten pretty good at that, I can make my own dough.
Adding more salt as a ‘topping’ helped improve the taste of the pizza overall. Decent workaround for now.
I learned in #1535 that mixing the salt into the tomato sauce is a far better approach. It spreads the saltiness evenly across the pie.