Baking Pizza in a Home Oven
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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 hard/tough.
Presumably, I need to get the oven hotter. I could try moving the steel right underneath the broiler while preheating.
The toppings were done cooking much faster than the dough and started burning a bit toward the end.
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.
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.