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This post encouraged me to make account and leave a comment after couple years of read-only

/sorry for bad english/

Long ago, in yearly middle-school time I am argue with friends about optimum(by combined simplicity and taste score) way to bake frozen pizza, and all about with electric heating oven VS microwave. After some time oven was chosen, but I thinked that made oven pre-heaten was waste of time and try to approximate it with longer cooking in just powered oven. I have been tried to made some calculations with paper and microcalculator. Some years after I remembered it and understood that I was reinvent some integration stuff.

And pizza was burnt because all of this distraction

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1) Frozen pizza is awful 2) To properly bake a pizza you need 350/400 C 3) Normal electrical ovens arrive to 220/240 C and the pizza becomes dry and crunchy 4) If you put a frozen pizza in a cold oven it will always be burnt because by the time the inside is cooked the outside has become overcooked and burnt 5) Please don’t make me cry writing pizza misadventures :’(

The solution to 2 is to get a special pot made out of stone that you place in the oven and it accumulates heat. After 30 minutes it has the necessary temperature and then you place the pizza on top of it.

Or a pizza steel which I've wanted to try forever: https://slice.seriouseats.com/2012/09/the-pizza-lab-the-baki... ... not a perfect neapolitan but looks good enough for me.

My wife and I just made 4 pizzas on this last night. It is great but the edges around the pizza were golden brown and not that bubbly crispy crust you get in pizzerias. I am convinced now more than ever that the dough is the critical procedural element we were getting wrong. She used a 1 hour dough where even the pizza steel recommends a 72 hour one. Needless to say, she has one in the proofer for Wednesday night.

> not that bubbly crispy crust you get in pizzerias

Yes, aside from high heat the cold ferment step seems to play a big role: https://slice.seriouseats.com/2010/09/the-pizza-lab-how-long...

I highly suggest this recipe (From here: http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm)

  Ingredient (grams)        1 Pie  3 Pied  5 Pies	
  Filtered Water	    110	   330	   550	
  King Arthur Bread flour   168	   510	   850	
  Kosher or Sea Salt        6	   18	   30	
  Sourdough yeast culture   15	   45	   60	
  Instant Dry yeast 	    0.5	   1.5	   2.5	


  All ingredients into mixer except 25% of flour.
  Mix on lowest speed for 1-2 minutes or until completely blended.
  Cover and Let it rest for 20 minutes.
  Start Mixing on Low speed for 8 minutes. 5 minutes into it start adding held back flour gradually.
  Mix for 1 more minute

  Divide in to 300g balls and either let raise warm (3-10 hours) or cold (2-7 days).

Good recommendation! Big fan of his work...

I use the recipe from this book + the levain instructions — https://www.amazon.com/Flour-Water-Salt-Yeast-Fundamentals/d...

Highly recommend though I believe the author is located in the Pacific Northwest, and one thing I have found is nearly all recipes should have their hydration ratios adjusted to your local climate. Local humidity / seasons tend to have impacts on dough.

Having worked in Italian Pizzerias (in Italy), 2 days minimum for a decent crust, but the cheap places don't all do that.

2 days in the fridge? How many hours out after that? Tell us the secret!

I would agree with this as well. My best crusts rise from 36-48 hours in the fridge, after which they're baked almost immediately at 450-500F for 10-12 minutes.

At least two days, I'd say 5+ is best if you have the foresight.

To use, just take it out a few hours ahead of time so that it can warm up to RT and rise again.

It's not a formula! Take it out when you start prep for the evening, so it's at least 90 minutes before first use. But pizza made at close will be different than pizza made at the beginning of the shift.

Forgot to mention: It is a perpetual starter--take a pizza worth of dough to start the next batch (for maybe 100 pizzas).

To add, I think perhaps the levain makes it develop to a good state faster such that 2 days is fine as opposed to the 3+ I seem to need with no levain, if you want the nice spotted and bubbly dark and light pattern as opposed to the even golden brown.

For sure a live starter makes things move extremely fast. We would usually leave it at room temp for a shift and then refrigerate. I have seen people talking about 5+ days here. That would leave a spoiled batch using this faster method. 4 days tops usually.

Good dough is easy:

* Use bread flour

* Let it sit refrigerated for a few days before use. 1-2 weeks is pretty ideal.

Compared to a fresh dough, you'll get that nice crispy crust and chewy, flavorful interior.

1-2 weeks is far too long for a yeasted dough to sit in a refrigerator. 2-5 days would be the max.

I agree. 24-48 hours is the ideal refrigerator proofing time for pizza dough in my experience.

Too much beyond that the dough will break down too much, becoming gooey, tearing easily when handled, and resulting in a hard/crunchy crust.

Proofed dough balls can be frozen for storage, however. They keep well in the freezer and defrost quickly when needed.

Indeed. Although Physics is important in the cooking process, Pizza is all about Biochemistry. Since flour and water have essentially no flavor, all the taste comes from what the yeast makes as it metabolizes the flour and other carbohydrates present. More metabolic activity == more flavor. More time == more yeast output.

I just toss my cast iron griddle in the oven. It's not large enough to cook a huge pizza but I usually cook smaller pies anyway. Works great.

i have alot of plate steel lying around. cut a piece of 3/8" (~1cm) to fit exactly in the oven, put stainless handles on it (its probably 30lbs/14kg) to lift it in and out. cleaned it off well and seasoned with avocado oil (I guess flax is better, but it spoils)

takes a long time to heat up, but when it does pizza cooks like its supposed to, and the oven temp springs back quickly after you close the door.

inexpensive and pretty durable. highly recommend.

I use a ~35x40cm, 8mm thick, ~8kg slab of iron as a baking steel. It does take a while to heat up, and conversely also to cool down again, but it produces extremely consistent and good results.

As someone who's cracked several conventional baking stones, I would be seriously surprised if the Slab O' Steel doesn't outlast me. I can highly recommend getting one, it's definitely worth it.

Portable bench-top pizza "ovens" do amazingly well.

They have a heated stone base and large electrical elements in the lid. You have to be careful not to cook it too fast -- you turn it right down between pizzas.

Downside is they only do one at a time but that's usually fine.

[edit - the one we have is very similar to this: New Wave NWKA 1200W Stone Bake Just Pizza Maker (Red) ]

That only gets up to 280C it looks like, at that point it's not really any different than an oven with a pizza stone

My parents have one of those, they use it maybe twice a year. It does make good pizza though.

They're a like a bread maker in that regard. They seem super useful, but just never get used.

> They're a like a bread maker in that regard. They seem super useful, but just never get used.

I use my bread maker almost every day, sometimes twice. I dismantled the table top pizza oven because it was useless and now I just use the stone from it in the oven.

I suspect I am an outlier in the bread maker statistics :-)

I've actually had some really good frozen pizzas. The best ones I ever had were actually $4 frozen pizzas from the supermarket that were made in Italy. I'm not sure how they made a pizza in Italy and shipped it to NZ and managed to sell it for $4, but they were great, or at least the quattro fromaggio ones were. The ones with any frozen vegetables like mushrooms were sort of crap, the mushrooms went all watery.

In my experience with frozen pizza, the ones with less ingredients are better. Any frozen vegetables will go watery, so your options are really pepperoni or plain cheese. You want a pizza with a nice thin base

Let the pizza defrost for a little bit with the wrapper off before you put it in the oven, then blast it in the oven at maximum temperature.

It helps if you put the pizza on a pizza stone or on a rack, rather than on a tray. If it's on a tray, the bottom tends to get soggy.

ALDI has some really good ones for $3AU too, the supreme ones (basically ham, cheese and capsicum if that counts as supreme) anyway.

I cook from frozen normally, but for a really "gourmet" frozen pizza experience defrost is completely and stick it under the grill. Wonderful grilled cheese on top and still a soft fluffy base underneath.

As a recent immigrant to Australia, I'm yet to try the Aldi frozen pizzas. The 3 for $6 ones look good though.

I'm constantly impressed with the quality of Aldi food for how insanely cheap it is, especially their frozen goods. I can eat well for $5 per day on Aldi food.

Same deal in the UK. Some people turn their nose up at it, along with their fellow German brethren Lidl. I don't see why. Some of the food outright beats the food from Tesco, where it can sometimes be twice as expensive.

Uh, off-topic but as a non-native speaker, is that use of "capsicum" standard? Where are you located?

I had to look it up to make sure you meant (US: bell) peppers.

Capsicum is the standard name in here (Australia) from wikipedia:

>The large, mild form is called bell pepper, or by color or both in North America and the United Kingdom, but typically called capsicum in New Zealand,[8] Australia, South Africa, Singapore, and India.

It does seem strange that even anglosphere countries in the eastern hemisphere ended up with a different name for some reason. Presumably it was also called that in the UK at some point too.

I grew up in Australia calling them capsicum. Now I live in the UK and the Netherlands, it is pepper/paprika respectively.

Some other differences in Australian and UK usage are zucchini vs courgette and eggplant vs aubergine. Not much of a French influence down-under. And Italian immigrants dominated Melbourne's fruit and veg trade in the 1960s.

I always get confused and just use one or the other. Conveniently it doesn't really matter because everyone understands me when I use any of the above in Australia.

> Presumably it was also called that in the UK at some point too.

Perhaps it became common in all of these countries at the same time, long after colonisation, leading to different marketing/naming between these countries.

I really, really love Red Baron frozen pizza. I dunno, I think it's the crust maybe? It's crisp but not cracker-like, a bit buttery, almost pastry-ish.

(Geez, I sound like a shill. After 5 years and 8000+ HN karma, Red Baron's sockpuppet account finally pays off!)

Playing the long game! Very good.

Just a detail: That's bluewater shipping, which is unbelievably cheap these days if you have the right kind of load. Some of the modern ships carry a thousand containers per crew member. The cost of the crew, fuel and ship itself is spread over many containers, and if your load has the right weight/volume ratio, you can negotiate extra low rates.

I just find it so fascinating that it can be cheaper to ship things from Europe than make them locally, even if logically I know that it makes sense.

As another example: the budget branded fries that I brought for $2 for a kg came from the Netherlands. Not only was I amazed that it was cheaper than locally made fries, but that was cheaper than I could buy fresh potatoes.

Somehow it's cheaper to grow potatoes, cut them up, package them, and ship them to New Zealand, than it is to grow potatoes in New Zealand and drive them to the supermarket.

Looking at ballpark estimates, potato chips weigh about 500 kg/m^3 [1], meaning you can fit 27 t in a shipping container [2] with some space left over, as 27 t is the maximum weight for a 40 ft container. This would cost around $4,500 to ship from Rotterdam to Auckland in a refrigerated container [3].

So per 1 kg packet, you're looking $0.17 for shipping costs. That's pretty astoundingly low.

[1] http://www.mpd-inc.com/bulk-density/

[2] http://www.dsv.com/sea-freight/sea-container-description/dry...

[3] http://worldfreightrates.com/freight

You still have to drive it to the stores once it's on land though...

You have to do that anyway: either from the port to the store, or from the field to the factory to the store.

Unless your point is that the shipping is cheap in absolute terms, in which case 'yes' :) Although I don't think it will add much. Say pizzas are shipped 500 km, on average (for the North Island - most of them will stay in Auckland, and I imagine those going to Wellington are shipped there directly). Either way, transport like that will cost you, say Eur 1/NZD 1.75/USD 1.15 per kilometer? (IIRC from the time I worked for a transport company). But you can fit, say, 50k of them in a truck. That's 1-2 cents depending on which currency you look at, and that's using lowball estimates, and not using bulk shipping discounts.

It's amazing and completely counter-intuitive how cheap shipping is. Which is also why I so dislike the 'food miles' concept. Yes, it's 3k km to drive lettuce from Spain to Northern Europe. But you can fit so many of them in a truck, that the per-item cost is tiny, and quite often offsets the extra costs you'd have to make to grow that same lettuce up north. And yes that's even when calculating in the environmental costs (depending of course on the crop and the time of year; my point: just having fewer 'food miles' doesn't necessarily make it better for the environment).

The key word is "fresh", also termed "spillage". The potatoes you buy have to be there when you walk into the shop, fresh enough that you don't walk out again or complain. Shops throw away a lot of vegetables, even fairly robust ones like potatoes, and of course the spillage percentage is added to the price you pay. The fries are much more flexible time-wise.

Preheat the pan with the oven for better crust.

As a roccbox owner and someone who has made pizza from my earliest memories, I would say there are some tasty frozen pizzas. Totinos comes to mind, it is nothing like a neapolitan or even dominos pizza, but the way it cooks up turns it into a sweet-sauced cheesy cracker. You just can't think of it as traditional pizzs.

>4) If you put a frozen pizza in a cold oven it will always be burnt because by the time the inside is cooked the outside has become overcooked and burnt

This seems backwards. The hotter the oven, the less time for the heat to diffuse inwards before the outside is burnt. The lower the temperature, the more even the heat.

I'd imagine the reason not to put it before it's done preheating is standardization. If my oven takes 5 minutes and yours takes 10 to get to 400, there's no way to write one single set of directions for how long to cook it from the time of powering it on. It's hard enough with everyone's different freezer temperatures.

Yes, but the hotter it is the faster the outside will burn at a faster rate. If you want meat evenly cooked, it is slow and steady fire. If you want it crusty on the outside but raw inside, you would use strong fire. That is why you unfreeze food at room temperature and not in the oven.

PS, I found best results with a bit of microwave first (to unfreeze the inside, the microwaves do penetrate quite well) and then to the oven.

If you freeze your own pizza they taste pretty good, so I wonder why store bought pizzas don't.

You can't bake good napolitan pizza at home but you can bake decent pizza at home as long as you change the recipe to be nontraditional. I make a very wet dough, let it rise, then spread it on olive oil greased sheets, rise again then pre bake the crust until it is firm enough to put on the toppings then bake again. The crust is like a thin focaccia.

>"You can't bake good napolitan pizza"

Yes you can. Good dough, high thermal mass (baking steel) and thorough preheating are the most important points.

"Oh, but it doesn't get to 350/400/a quadrillion degrees like a real pizza oven does!" the peanut gallery cries.

A lot of great pizzarias don't bake their pizzas above ~300 anyway. Just turn your oven way up and let it preheat properly. It is not properly heated when the indicator bulb turns off. Give it at least another 15 minutes to get the baking surface thoroughly warmed through. If water droplets don't show the Leidenfrost effect on the baking surface, it is nowhere near hot enough.

The problem with low heat is that the pizza doesn't rise properly and the pizza needs to stay in the over for longer which makes the crust dry out. If you have a good oven and a pizza stone then you might be able to do it, but most people don't have that. My oven maxes out at 200 even though it claims to do 230.

~240 here, and I've got a very high thermal mass baking steel.

1) agree, probably between awful and tolerable 2) yep, but in most home it isn't available(maybe in most homes in all remembered areas, excluding countryside) 3) yes(but one another time i have pyroelectric autocleaning oven and accidentally burnt accesories in it) 4) partly agree, but partly have ideas like ihm and franciscop https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17439057

sorry for slow answer

>"To properly bake a pizza you need 350/400" >"Normal electrical ovens arrive to 220/240 C"

You don't really need it, you can produce extremely good pizzas in an ordinary oven, as long as you remember to preheat it and have enough thermal mass in your baking stone/steel. Once the oven reaches temp, give it at least another 15 minutes to really preheat the stone.

Preheating and a good dough have been the key ingredients for me. That and a hefty 8kg baking steel. Metal retains more heat and dumps it a lot quicker into the crust than a traditional backing stone.

No problem about bad English. But hey, can I ask you what your first language is? Very curious to know!

Cyrillic based east european ._.

I am very curious if you had any success baking pizza starting from a cold oven.

Yes, at least not worse than made-by-guideline freezed\simple recepies. This branch have some similar thoughts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17439057

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