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Comment by hendricius | Hacker News Reader

Another great tip I wanted to share is to use a pizza stone. Even better than a stone is a pizza steel. The steel releases the heat faster to the dough than the stone. If you had a stone brick oven at 450°C you would not need this. At a regular oven at home, a steel does wonders. I got my pizza from 80% Neapolitan style to 95%.

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I got a cast iron Lodge pizza pan (iron, not steel), admittedly in large part because I have a cast iron fetish. It was cheap, has served excellently for making pizzas, and doubles as an extraordinarily large griddle for making bulk pancakes or broiling steaks.

Best 12 euros I've ever spent, even thought I haven't yet mastered the stone in a kettle barbecue the results in my Ikea electric oven are amazing.

Have you experimented with placing a pizza steel on a rack above the pizza? I'm wondering if this would trap the heat more. Maybe my intuition is wrong.

I'd go for the broiler instead, but two baking steels must be the best I've read, one at the bottom and one on the top below the broiler... then go from putting the pizza on the top steel and broiler on to the bottom steel for another minute or so

Yes - I prefer steel to stone. Mostly because I've had multiple pizza stones break on me mid cook. My steel never has.

How long does it take to cook with that? A real pizza oven is supposed to cook your pizza in 3 minutes tops.

Around that time yes, 3 minutes. I sometimes just sit in front of the oven wand watch it grow. It's so satisfying.

I have a baking steel, I preheat the steel at 450 (my maximum oven temperature) for at least 30 minutes. Pizza is baked in ~5-8 minutes.

Real pizza ovens are much hotter.

In my oven I reach 520F and it is done way quicker.

I thought the point of the steel was to throw it under the broiler to get it above 700 deg, and then bake the pizza under the broiler?

The steel releases the heat faster than the stone. Yes, heat it up as much as possible. Still you will not manage to have the same air circulation as in a stone brick oven. Thus you can not reach the same result. But it can get close to a 95% version. I sometimes use a blow torch to sizzle my pizza further.

That's a good idea, pre-heating it under the broiler. I do finish the pizzas (last ~2 mins) under the broiler as well.

I have a new oven, so my time estimates are still fairly approximate.

The < 3 minutes is from Neapolitan style pizza, which is in a 900F+ oven. Home ovens won't get anywhere near that unless you modify their cleaning cycle, but almost nobody does that. You can get to 900F pretty easily with some inexpensive outdoor ovens.

A gas BBQ with a hood can also get you up to 450C depending on the brand.

If I had disposable income I'd get a https://ooni.com/

What brand of pizza steel would you recommend?

Just use a large stainless steel pan

Do those have enough thermal mass to make a difference?

No they don't. Pizza steel thing is quite heavy (~15lbs).

Bad advice. You want big heavy chunk of metal to retain temperature while pizza is cooking.

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