Folks who know pizza:
What can those us with regular ovens do? You know, the sort of oven you find in most kitchens that top out at 250C (500F)?
What can those us with regular ovens do? You know, the sort of oven you find in most kitchens that top out at 250C (500F)?
2. Make your own sauce. The ingredients are cheap, and a little experimentation will get it to the taste that you want.
3. Don't overtop it. The natural tendency is to want more - more sauce, more cheese, more whatever else. Start off very simply. Scatter little bits.
4. Transfer as much heat as possible to the bottom of your crust. You can use a baking steel, a pizza stone, or unglazed fire tiles available for less than $10 at your local hardware store. Put them in the oven exactly where you want your pizza to go, then fire it all the way up.
5. Experiment. The first few pizzas you make will vary wildly from "almost what I want" to "maybe I shouldn't make pizza". Keep going. Take notes.
And if you don't have an oven at all, consider getting a cast iron frying pan and try for a completely different kind of pizza: http://www.seriouseats.com/2016/08/cast-iron-pizza-tortilla-...
[0] Not sure why I've never tried before. I guess because the pizza's been so good.
I tried for a while but then gave up. Just not hot enough. I actually found Jeff's recipe waaay back before he opened his restaurant, I remember him announcing it, and I was really upset when I got to the oven temperatures.
Preheat the oven with the cookie sheet inside, prepare your pizza on a lightweight cutting board. The trick is to slide the uncooked pizza onto the hot sheet. A dusting of cornmeal on the cutting board will make the pizza positively glide off, but purists will bicker…
This.
I improvised a pan "pizza" that the whole family likes that's non-traditional but delicious... Dice 1/2lb of thick bacon or pancetta. Dice a few yellow potatoes. While the meat bits brown in a pan, parboil the potatoes. Chop a bunch of rinsed kale. Drain the potatoes. Set aside the meat, reserving the fat in two portions. Cook chopped garlic with a dash of salt in one portion of fat, about a minute, then cook down the kale until it softens and reduces in size, a few minutes. Get a second pan very hot, add the second portion of fat, and fry the potatoes until golden. Before removing the potatoes from the heat, toss with garlic, rosemary, oregano, and a little salt, cooking a minute. Now use these to top a dough and sprinkle with just a couple of ounces of shredded mozzarella and fresh grated romano.
It's mind-boggling how deep these new online communities around barbeque, cheesemaking, or sour beer brewing (shoutout to milk the funk) can get, where at a certain point, there's a scientific breakdown of the variables involved. This sort of food science blends anthropology, biology, marketing, and engineering. It's so much fun.
I think this is important: Sauce and toppings all compete with the crust for heat.
Every time I've made pizza the stuff I've put in the oven has been pretty good when I take it out. The pizza usually comes with a very short time window for availability: then it's gone. It probably requires great talent to majorly fail a pizza. If you only fail your pizza slightly, it's still damn good.
Now, I'm quite sure that you can even objectively establish that there are better pizzas than what I make. The point is then: why would I care if I'm happy with whatever I currently make?
If I fell in love with a truly, absolutely and universally the greatest pizza then I'd just be disappointed with my own pizzas afterwards and I'd have to learn how to make those great pizzas. Instead of an upgrade that actually sounds more like a net loss to me because now I have to work to get back to where I was, i.e. happy with my pizza.
If you're happy with your pizzas, change nothing and continue.
With such "cold" oven the best is to cook "nonna" pizza (grand ma'). I think this one is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2ws4sTKrdI For the dough, you can use this ones as inspiration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gijjMJiR_q0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcD999Ci78E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-SJGQ2HLp8
Best tip to avoid uncooked dough under the tomato sauce: remove all the possible water from the tomato sauce.
From memory, it was basically to heat up a cast iron pan to get it very hot and then to sit the pizza on top of that, with the other side of it close to the grill element. He also mentioned how you can use the 'cleaning mode' of some ovens to get up to the required temperature.
A description here http://www.insearchofheston.com/2013/05/how-to-make-hestons-... - see "Step 7: Cooking the Pizza"
He broke the safety latch off his oven and put a piece of foil over the sensor, and runs his oven on Clean mode.
Preheat for an hour and drop the pizza on it. Also turn the infrared broiler. Or blowtorch. Thin crust also helps.
Edit: If you can think of way to make the topping stay in place(impossible) , the perfect way to bake a pizza is tandoor. Good pizza is rich flatbread and not casserole on a dough. Which from my observations is the biggest error people make.
http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2012/09/the-pizza-lab-...
Pizza stones or ceramic tiles don't work well in the ovens, even though they are often marketed for oven use. They are great on BBQ grills though.
OTOH, the Fool Proof pan pizza is excellent and works every time -
http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/01/foolproof-pan-piz...
PS. There are also small-ish wood-fired ovens for those with a bit of backyard. I can't seem to find it now, but these are made by a specialist company that also sells an unbranded version -
https://uk.uuni.net/collections/frontpage/products/uuni-3
He also takes it on holidays and trips.
http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2012/10/the-pizza-lab-...
So it is thermal capacity plus conductivity together.
I've been reading this book and it has a good mix of history/context, technique and recipes. It is aimed at folks with a regular oven. Its process for Margherita is multi-step and uses the broiler aggressively; more than I would normally be comfortable with. The output from my regular oven (max 550 C) matches the cover image from the book.
The dough is key, though. I like high salt, low yeast, long fermentation styles. I'm still doing trials with different flour (e.g. caputo 00, blue bag (a standard pizza flour) vs. generic all-purpose flour) to suss out the difference flour makes but the book goes into this in depth, including a basic overview of what the different ingredients are for, chemically, to give you a sense of why some recipes are different (long vs. short fermentation influences amount of yeast/salt.)
If you're going to go heavy on the toppings, bake the the dough for a while, then add toppings.
[1] http://simplyhomecooked.com/khachapuri-georgian-cheese-bread...
You want a peel. Coarse ground cornmeal, coarse Durham wheat flour, and other course-ground wheat products all work well to keep your dough mobile. Make sure you can shake it on the peel before trying to transfer. Build the pizza on the peel or you'll make a mess of it.
You can probably get away with a lower oven temp with pan pizza. Oil cast iron pan, preheat oven. Build pizza in pan (dough running up the sides). Cook on stovetop until it starts to sizzle (I also hit the top with a heat gun at this point, but you don't have to). Move to oven, turn broiler on, cook until the top looks done. May take some experimentation, but it takes less equipment than using a stone and peel. Note: I haven't done this one in a while and I think maybe I cooked it for a few minutes before kicking in the broiler, but I'm not sure. Experiment.
You can make pretty good pizza with dough made in a bread machine. If you have one, consider starting with that. Much easier.
[EDIT] more lifehack protips now that I have a keyboard:
1) If you like pepperoni pizza, try the sandwich-slice stuff at the deli counter. Even the cheaper varieties of this are better than the small ones you find in packages. If you're going to a real deli or whatever keep doing what you're doing, but this will help with ordinary grocery store shopping.
2) You don't have to have fresh mozz for every pie (though man is it good) but do spend up slightly on the cheese if you can, and favor block over pre-shredded (no anti-caking agents in the block cheese). HOWEVER, as long as you don't get the absolute worst cheese you can find, cheaping out a bit here will not ruin your pizza, it just won't be as good. You can still beat all the major chains with Kraft. Also: consider mixing in other stuff with your mozz for some depth, especially if you're not paying for high-end cheese. Provolone's a common option.
3) Don't spend a ton on San Marzano (or "San Marzano Style") canned tomatoes, unless it's a really special pizza. If you garden, consider growing your own San Marzanos and canning (you'll have too many to use in a Summer even with just 3-4 plants)—it's the very best option, flavor wise. Having-a-religious-moment good. For your everyday pizza just get decent canned tomatoes. Do not use fresh tomatoes unless you know the person who grew them (this goes for practically any dish that calls for tomatoes). Again, you're gonna have to buy the worst canned tomatoes you can possibly find to maybe make your pizza worse than the major chains—not that they necessarily use tomatoes that bad, but home-made pizza tends to be so good that you have to really screw up ingredient selection to ruin it, though obviously good ingredients are necessary if you want to achieve Pizza Nirvana.
4) Beware under-salting your dough and sauce. No, that recipe you found isn't wrong, and yes you should put that much black pepper in pizza sauce. In fact maybe give it another couple turns.
I've been making homemade pan pizzas for years using aluminum half sheet pans (like this https://www.webstaurantstore.com/bakers-mark-18-x-13-half-si...) and a convection oven set to 550 or whatever it'll heat to. My observations:
* dough should be cool but close to room temp
* let the oven stand at the set temperature for at least ten minutes before using it.
* lightly bake the dough without toppings first on the lowest rack setting or directly on the bottom of the oven so the pan heats and the bottom of the pizza crisps.
* if using a tomato sauce, apply sparingly and bake again for a few minutes to drive off some moisture.
* use less toppings than you think
As an aside, I once set the oven on self-clean, forgetting a pizza stone was still in there, and that was a mixed experience. On the one hand, I had to open the windows and pull the smoke detectors as smoke poured out of the oven for a while. On the other hand, when done, the pizza stone looked like it was fresh out of the box, not a stain on it.
I have no idea if that's a plus, a minus, or meant nothing for that particular stone... but it eventually cracked like the others.
OTOH, you can get something like this for ~100€, https://www.g3ferrari.net/en/pizzeria-snack-napoletana-p153
Thank you all, folks, this has been an education.