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Comment by JackMcMack | Hacker News Reader

My favorite read on pizza: http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm

Damn, he bakes those at 825F (440 °C), which unfortunately is unattainable with most regular home ovens. Mine e.g. maxes out at 300 °C so it's not hot enough to let the crust rise significantly and produce a nicely charred underside, at least not before completely burning the top.

What I'm currently experimenting with to solve this problem is to put the pizza on a flat, heavy and preheated iron pan or plancha and heat it at maximum power on the induction stove for 3 minutes to get the metal really hot. Then I put it in the oven at 300 °C for around 10 minutes. Doesn't produce perfectly charred pizza but comes a lot closer to what you can achieve with a real pizza oven. Still I'm not fully satisfied with the result, so thanks for the article link, I'll definitely try to apply some tricks mentioned there!

For a quick pizza, I use a "Ooni" pizza oven and the results have been great. It's relatively cheap and you can get the temperatures you are looking for. I joined their first kickstarter and have been buying their ovens ever since:

https://uk.ooni.com/collections/shop-all/products/ooni-koda

For years I've dreamed of building a wood-fired pizza oven, or buying one of the cast kits from https://www.fornobravo.com/. But this looks way easier and cheaper.

How long does a gas cylinder last?

I've got the big ooni oven, and use it pretty much daily for 1-5 pizzas. It takes 20-25 minutes to heat up, then maybe 90 seconds to cook a pizza. The gas burner states it uses about 450g per hour on max, which seems to tally with what I get out of a 13kg propane bottle, which is in the region of 45 -60 days. The propane tank costs €34 to refill here.

edit: I also dreamed for years of building a wood-fired oven, but I'm totally happy with the gas one. The way I can make myself a pizza in 25 minutes start to finish is hard to argue with. People ask me if the lack of smoke in the oven makes for a subpar pizza, but in my opinion it makes no difference. The oven is so hot that any smoke in a wood-fired oven is well above the pizza. It's just the heat you need.

I have a green-egg[1] style ceramic grill that works really well for pizza. Wood-fired, and can get up to a pretty good temperature. I use a pizza stone in it.

1: The exact brand is a Kamado ceramic grill.

Cool, but why do those cost like a Rolls Royce? Just a big ceramic ball, but priced like its made of gold.

With the Green Egg, you’re paying for a brand name for sure. The Kamado is definitely not cheap, but it’s typically around half the price.

What kind of pizza stone do you use? I have a green egg, but have never made pizza in it.

I use an Emile Henry pizza stone.

My parents have a wood fired, and I have an Ooni Koda. I can compare:

- The base is better on the wood fired oven. The Kodas stone doesn't get hot enough. I've read recommendations to replace the stone with a steel, because it's more conductive.

- The koda heats up in a timescale I'm ok with. Like, 20 minutes. For the wood fired oven, it usually takes about 2 hours for the oven itself to be hot enough, but you really want the oven to be completely saturated with heat. This can take over 4 hours.

- I've had the Koda about 6 months now, and used it about 20 times. It hasn't really registered on the meter attached to my 13 kg gas bottle, and this is the only thing I use it for. I'm not at all concerned about the gas usage, even when its used a refill is cheap.

- The wood oven, in contrast, goes through wood significantly faster than our wood burning stove.

- I can do more with the wood oven, like bread, or roasts. The profile of the Koda means my normal cookware doesn't fit, and while I'm ok with buying Ooni's low profile cast iron, I just haven't done it yet. That said, while I like the idea of cooking food under real fire with smoke and intense direct heat, I don't see that with essentially a big gas oven. I have other tools.

- I can take the Koda anywhere, but when my parents move house there's no chance the wood oven moves.

Is there risk of the steel damaging the Koda?

I had a piece of steel on a propane grill before, and the lid of the grill warped pretty significantly from it.

Have you tried using it e.g. for baking bread, grilling vegetables or similar? I'm not a fan of having one-purpose devices.

This is a good cheap alternative: https://www.amazon.com/Breville-Crispy-Crust-Pizza-BREBPZ600... It looks like it might be discontinued although there is a similar one by another brand on amazon. Its major drawback is its only good for a pizza as large as 10-12 inches and if your pizza gets a large high bubble it can touch the upper element. I have made much better pizza with it then my standard kitchen oven. I do want to build a brick oven in the backyard when I get a chance some day though.

Steel slab ("pizza steel") + broiler at full blast does a good job.

Would it be better with two slabs of steel, one above one below?

Intuitively, I don't think so. The steel is colder than the actual oven, what it does better is transfer heat by conduction into the dough (better than stone at that). That only works if it's touching the pizza.

You would heat the metal to temp before putting the pizza in. Dark metals have higher radiant heat, so maybe cast iron above it would be even better than steel.

The high heat drives moisture out of the ingredients faster than the moisture can collect on the top of the pizza. You can simply remove the moisture from the ingredients ahead of time. I make the marinara & set the sauce in a fine strainer in a pot, and let it drain for at least 45, preferably an hour. For the mozzarella, I put down a cutting board, a towel, some paper towel, the cheese, then reverse the whole process & place a skillet on top. (This can overdry the mozzarella, causing it to melt out, so it takes some experience.)

Without moisture, you can cook the pizza longer, at a lower temperature.

I combine this with Kenji Lopez-Alt's "no hack pizza" method: the pizza is cooked on a stone in a heavy cast iron skillet. To make the pizza, pull the skillet out of the oven, and put it on the stove at the highest setting your stove goes to (preferably a gas stove). Make the pizza in the skillet, then return the whole thing to the oven.

> Foolproof Pan Pizza Recipe

> THE PIZZA LAB

> J. KENJI LÓPEZ-ALT

https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/01/foolproof-pan-pi...

Does removing the moisture prevent that thin layer of raw/uncooked/wet dough just under the marinara sauce? That's my biggest problem with making pizza at home and I thought it was because I just couldn't get my home oven hot enough.

A few years back I gave the Roccbox a shot (https://us.gozney.com/products/roccbox). It takes a special flour (Tipo 00 is what I use) so it doesn't char at 850F. The oven is certainly not cheap and there are cheaper alternatives, but I wanted something portable and more rugged-makes camping fun and we cook more than pizza. It get's me that nice charred bottom, but I typically tend to overcook the cheese.

I still continue to use my oven at times, especially when the weather isn't helping. The broiler is helpful there with a pizza stone.

No matter what I use, it's a fine dance to get things right. Sometimes it comes out great, especially when I give things a few days to cold-rise in the fridge. Usually something goes wrong, either too burnt, not fully cooked, or simply not enough pizza :)

Tipo 00 is not special but very common flour n. 405 (german system). Many tutorials refer to this flour like there is something special inside that will make the pizza better...but there isn't.

It makes a huge difference to the characteristics of the dough, you can feel it instantly when stretching.

I just took delivery of my Roccbox and am firing it up this weekend.

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it, but there are some pizza hobbyists on YouTube who actually remove the safety lock from their ovens and then put them on self-cleaning mode to get the temperature up super high.

The way I've been doing mine is to preheat the oven as hot as it will get and with a baking steel on the rack second to the top. You could probably do something similar with the iron pan/plancha.

Then when it is as hot as it's going to get, slide the pizza on to the steel/pan/whatever and switch the oven to high broil. The heat from the baking steel cooks from the bottom and the broiler hits it from the top, delivering high heat on both sides.

I can get a pretty solid pizza in 5 minutes and there are lots of variations on this method (broil for a few min, switch to bake for the last few, etc) but you can play around with your oven and setup to get the best results.

I find a pizza stone is a great addition to the regular home oven for crispy bases.

Yes! Pizza stone! Best 12 euros I've ever spent.

This[0] is the kind of results I'm able to get in a normal Ikea electric oven that maxes out at 250 C. Another thing you can do with it is experiment with a Weber-like barbecue...

[0] https://imgur.com/a/7MDWyv4

Do you pre-cook the base? At the point the crust would start looking like that, my cheese would be extremely dried out.

Mozzarella goes in 2 minutes before I pull it out, I'm pretty sure this was also a suggestion in the article above.

> he bakes those at 825F (440 °C), which unfortunately is unattainable with most regular home ovens

He was using a regular home oven, subverting the cleaning cycle: "The cabinet of most ovens is obviously designed for serious heat because the cleaning cycle will top out at over 975 which is the max reading on my Raytec digital infrared thermometer. The outside of the cabinet doesn't even get up to 85F when the oven is at 800 inside. So I clipped off the lock using garden shears so I could run it on the cleaning cycle. I pushed a piece of aluminum foil into the door latch (the door light switch) so that electronics don't think I've broken some rule by opening the door when it thinks it's locked. ..."

Scroll down to "4- The Oven" in http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm

Impressive dedication, which he eventually turned into a restaurant: http://www.varasanos.com/

Ah I see, interesting! I think they call that pyrolytic cleaning in Europe. The problem with that is that some ovens will lock the door for at least 30 minutes to keep people from burning themselves on the very hot surface. I learned this the hard way when I accidentally enabled this program, luckily without having any food in the oven :D

> The problem with that is that some ovens will lock the door...

"I clipped off the lock using garden shears"

Ok that’s hilarious. I guess I’ll read the article in full, just briefly skimmed over it so far.

The guy is so dedicated; it's a joy to read

I've eaten there, it was pretty good. If you're going for that kind of dedication to pizza however, breaking off the lock on the cleaning cycle of your oven is a wonky way to go about it. You'd be better suited building a wood fire oven or just buying a commercial oven instead. Eventually this is the conclusion they learned, they just took the way long way to get there.

Building a wood fired oven? You'd be better off airlifting an authentic clay oven from Naples. Might as well bring in a Neopolitan chef as well.

Nonsense. https://www.crustkingdom.com/pizza-oven-cost/

I get really good results with a 550F oven (pretty normal top temp in the US) with a pizza stone and a 7-9 minute bake (actually temperatures vary oven by oven, and some like to let the actual temp sag by as much as 100F rather than holding, so you've gotta reset them sometimes to get it back to 550).

Then again I also think the dough my Zojirushi bread machine turns out, left to rest overnight in the fridge, is close enough to my hand-made dough that I don't really bother with the latter anymore. So maybe I'm just not very discerning. My pizza's definitely better than all but the highest-end, fancy-pizza-oven places locally, though.

Stovetop start in cast iron is great for pan-style pizza, though. Heat the oven, build the pizza (on oil) in the pan, heat it 'till it sizzles for a minute or so, then in the oven, broiler to finish the top when you think it's getting close to done. Way less clean-up and lower equipment requirements than a stone-and-peel bake.

I heard good things about the baking steel:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bakingsteel/baking-stee...

This recipe is beyond my reach mostly due to lack of a proper oven. Still, it's one of the best reads I've had in a long while. I'd read content like this on any topic if only I knew how to find it. Perhaps there should be a google for SEO-unoptimised content.

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