Jeff Varasano's NY Pizza Recipe (2008)
varasanos.com
varasanos.com
I did most of the stuff on this page (short of breaking my self-cleaning lock). It is all great advice, and if you follow it and practice a lot, you can make great pizzas and wow your guests.
BUT! After you have done that, you can also violate all the rules and still get great pizzas. Once, I was in Waipio Valley in Hawaii, with just Pillsbury white flour, bread yeast, a block of cheddar cheese, Wesson oil, tomato paste, fresh oregano, and spring water. To bake I had a gas oven with the rack out, a tall soup pot, inverted with a big skillet also inverted over it, close under the broiler. The pizzas came out fantastic! I could only make them 9" across, so I ended up making 30+ of them.
I had no peel. My dough was very, very wet; I scooped enough for each pizza with a big kitchen spoon, spread it out on parchment, drizzled Wesson, smeared tomato, sprinkled oregano, salt, and cheddar, slid it onto the skillet, and started on the next one.
The one thing you mustn't ever neglect is letting the flour and water proof for 40+ minutes before you work it.
To get decent pizza at almost any American restaurant, you have to insist "burn it!" or they will be afraid you will get mad about a little charring, and so undercook it the way Americans demand. You have to tell them that if it bends, it's not done enough.
My son, a harsh critic, agreed: he ate five of them.
Not making the pizzas because the ingredients at hand seemed to portend doom would have been a grave mistake. The pizzas were memorable, the lesson moreso.
Thicker foccacia-style pizzas are very easy and come out right on the first try, but thin crust pizzas at the very least require an oven that can go above 300c and that's very rare.
> letting the flour and water proof
Autolyse.
The trick is to roll the dough out very thin, fold it and then unfold it in the pan (this way it doesn't break on the way), frie it from both sides before you add the tomato paste and cheese. Then just bake it with the lid closed until the mozarella is run.
It is practically impossible to teach people to want good quality when they are used to bad, and a reliably losing business strategy.
There was a movie about this: "Big Night" (1996, Isabella Rosselini, Stanley Tucci).
You might consider that if this is your observation, you may not be using a normal sense of the word "good".
This is the secret, combined with stretching the gluten without tearing the dough, and giving the dough enough time to slowly rise (e.g in a fridge overnight).
(Basically make Pan Cristal dough for your pizza )
As noted below, cooking is much more like music than engineering. There isn't one right way, yet there is no upper limit on the quality of the result. A business depends on repeatable results, but that's business. True mastery includes creativity and adaptability to circumstances.
Once I had a pot of lentils that was almost done. I tasted it and it needed something... I spotted a bowl of fresh black cherries, and thought "that's it!". I quartered and added some, and it was exactly the right thing, right then. I later found a Martha Steward lentils recipe that called for cherries.
Absolutely agree, I didn’t mean to imply that this was some kind of patentable solution; more like me discovering the intricacies of a new musical genre, and in my excitement, desperately trying to communicate what I (probably wrongly) think is the essential parts (to be mixed at your discretion)
The name "Pan de Cristal" is new to me. A new pleasure!
I just leave dough on the counter for 22-24 hours, room temperature, i.e. the Jim Lahey method. In rabid pizza forums the prevailing wisdom seems to be that cold-rise is inferior to that. However I'm not taking into account the other aspects of the technique.
Since I oven-bake at 550F my dough isn't nearly as wet. Still comes out quite flavorful. I don't autolyse before kneading however, and might endeavor to start doing so.
Yup. We had a great pizza chain called Anthony's Coal Fired Pizza, that would cook the pizza "well done". Apparently, they had enough complaints that they now under-cook it by default, unless you explicitly ask them to "burn it". Unfortunately, the new ownership that made that change (that Anthony refused to make for years), also made some other changes that took them from "great" to just "good".
1. This guy has it right where he doesn't cook the sauce first. To many people use a cooked pasta style sauce on pizza. It's just not right.
2. This website has that classic, 1998, don't give a shit, just a bunch of HTML and IMG tags look. Love it.
It's just a massive amount of information on a single page.
The content speaks for itself (not pun intended).
"It's like $POPULAR_APPLICATION, except it loads fast like Craigslist"
For those who don't know this means popups asking you to download the app or sign up for the newsletter
I found it impossible to read on mobile.
That itself seems impossible on mobile, regardless of whether you scroll or swipe or whatever.
That said I find this article easy to read on mobile.
honestly, it's one of the things I've always hated about reading books. i've just never found a comfortable way to read. it definitely has to do with why it takes me longer to read a book than other people.
I would have spent $79 on a Kindle, but...
HN people praising 90s web design like this as the epitome of design is comedy.
Maybe you need a better brain
In a medium or large company, it’s very difficult to get this opinion heard. Layers of decision-making and power plan this out months before hands-on devs get to do much good. In small companies, speed and cost-limiting almost demands we make bad decisions.
And no BS. I kinda miss the old web.
The current reality of technical literacy, despite the information on html being accessible, is so far from that original ideal.
My favorite step is “jailbreaking” your home oven with a pair of bolt cutters to use the cleaning cycle to get pizza oven temps.
> I've cook good pizzas at temps under 725F, but never a great one. 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.
I just don't want people reading this thread to think you can't make really good pizza at home without buying a bunch of stuff or resorting to modding your stove. You can even make pan pizzas, so you don't have to buy a stone or any of that. More steps[0] but it works, and makes a better pizza than any major chain, with no special equipment whatsoever and very little mess.
[0] Pre-heat oven, lightly oil pan, build pizza in cold pan, heat pan on stove top until oil's been sizzling for a minute or so, cook in oven for ~5-10 minutes, turn on the broiler to finish the top when it's almost done—or hit the top with an electric heat gun or butane torch from your garage while it's heating on the stove top at the beginning, for finer control and to save time by skipping the broiler.
It works well!
This really changed my approach to making home pizza.
I have baking stone and think it’s a waste of money.
My recommendations are:
Get a perforated pizza pan instead of a stone and bake on the lowest rung at the highest heat.
Use a basic bread recipe with and add yeast AND baking powder (or baking soda and cream of tartar in a 1:2 ratio). You can ensure the big bubbles and create texture differences.
I guess pizza preferences are derived from where one grows up, but Neapolitan is way over-represented in the DIY pizza-making scene. "Less popular" thick crust styles like Detroit are super easy to make and you don't need an Ooni/Breville or anything special besides a cake pan.
If you have two pans you can start making the second when the first has about a minute left - then the can finish a pie every 2.5 minutes!
i use all 3 and it’s nice to have options. my most common is a basic stone in the oven
.25” steel at second from top position, 550 warmup, turn off oven and open oven for a second, switch on to hi broil, pop in pizza after a few minutes. Steel gets to 650 but I think it’s thin enough to exhaust some of it’s heat.
If you have a baking steel, you can trick your oven into heating it well above the temperatures it normally allows. Place the steel very close to the broiler (leaving as little space as you can squeeze your pizza in) and leave the door slightly ajar. That little space will heat up high enough to make a "Neapolitan style" pizza in a home oven a possibility.
P.S. I've successfully done this; use this advice at your own risk :)
2. If I owned a cooking school, this guy would get an honorary degree. It's more enlightening than most PhD theses. Just kidding professional students. Kinda? I had an ex whom killed hundreds of lab rats validating an experiment that has been validated 40 times. She killed the rats by banging their heads onto a granite stone. She got mad when I didn't want to know more. She is now a vegetarian, but eats Salmon because it's good for her hair. I made the mistake of telling her she easen't technically a vegetarian over a "romantic" dinner. She didn't want to be just friends? She was out of my league thankfully. Meaning I wasen't worthy, and I agreed. (Sorry--reminiscing.)
3. If I read everything correctly, keeping the dough similar to stiff cake batter is what most of us have been doing wrong, along with the long wet mix in the mixer? This makes sence. I've heard a lot of bakers say to keep all dough wet, or as wet as possible.
Regarding recipes, Margarita is my go-to, more or less same sauce recipe, but I add a full ball of Burratta once out of the oven (too soft to even need to cook it).
Which version of it do you own? Have you found it useful for anything else? They seem to advertise cooking steak on it... Which I am skeptical of compared to a pan.
Load it up with 10 wet items and you get soggy pizza no matter what the oven temp is.
Edit-otherwise experiment with baking the crust first.
The pan will hit more than 1,000° so it will sear off the seasoning as well. So you’ll need to reseason it afterwards. That is why I don’t do it often.
This is all well and good, but given that it's mostly carbs (bread), how are you not hungry a short time later? Or do you have it for lunch, so you only have to last a few hours until supper/dinner?
I find that unless I have some protein/meat (which takes longer to digest?), my satiety doesn't last.
However, I go for the Heart Stopper, as served at Piecasso in Stowe, VT.
Double mozzarella, double pepperoni, double sausage.
With a Focal Banger from the Alchemist to wash it down.
I haven’t had any satiety issues.
And don't eat the whole thing.
Next time I make pizzas on my Big Green Egg I am going to try his recipe. No need for an oven when I can fire the egg up to whatever temp I want.
Cooks think cooking is music, with endless variations and interpretations.
There are very few cooks or musicians in this forum.
I bet there are more cooks and musicians here than you realise.
It was ok... but overpriced and really nothing special. I've had better pizza at dozens of places.
But it starts with a flavorful crust with just the right amount of char, good cheese, good sauce…
The best I’ve had personally was 2 Amy’s in DC. The Settobello location in SLC running a pretty close second.
Personally, I tend to agree with Varasano: I've never been to Naples, but I have been to Rome, and to my tastebuds, even US-cooked Neapolitan pizza is better than Roman pizza. But that's just it: that's just my opinion, based on my taste. Take it or leave it. You'll choose to leave it, no doubt, and that's ok.
> there are now many DC Neapolitan pizzerias of very high grade
This was written in 2008, so more recent establishments of course won't be listed.
I think Dar Poeta is excellent, though it's halfway between Roman and Neapolitan. And Roman-style Al Taglio is a phenomenal thing when done right.
Jeff Varasano's Famous New York Pizza Recipe (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14289307 - May 2017 (145 comments)
How an Engineer Does Pizza - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2023280 - Dec 2010 (88 comments)
The Perfect Pizza - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1464760 - June 2010 (5 comments)
But for those more into the traditional original bread-like Neapolitan style I strongly suggest using a sourdough based dough, like Tartine's[0]
Bear in mind: this is cooking, not engineering, not math. And, unlike New Yorkers seem to believe, pizza wasn't invented in the land of burguers and hotdogs.
Wherever there are Italian immigrants there are variations in pizza all over the world, from Chicago (deep dish) to Sao Paulo (stuffed border, "coroa de pizza"), from Liguria (piscialandrea) to Sicily (sfincione), from Rome (al taglio) to Naples, etc.
[0] https://food52.com/recipes/64201-tartine-s-pizza-dough
Edit: to open your mind I'd suggest "The wild pizzas of Southern Italy": https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-15/the-wild-...
I believe the interest in Neapolitan is an response to pizza being marketed at children for years in NA.
Similarily, comic-sans is perfectly acceptable font. Stop pretending you don't enjoy things you enjoy.
Like pineapple on pizza!!
Getting started making decent pizza at home is as simple and easy as a bread machine and a cast iron pan (or two).
(pro tip: get small cans of tomato sauce or crushed tomato [yes, use canned] and mix salt, way more black pepper than seems right, and some oregano [fresh is great if you have it, but dried is fine], directly in the can. Boom, nearly zero mess [one spoon, perhaps] sauce, on the cheap, and it's good. You don't need to pre-cook it, just put it directly on as is. You won't be able to beat this cheap, lazy method by too much unless you've got garden-grown sauce tomatoes)
[EDIT] other pro tip: you can build a pizza on your peel while another's in the oven provided you have a large cutting board. The pizza coming off the stone will be stiff enough that you can just shove it onto the cutting board. A peel provides little benefit for taking a pizza off a stone in a normal home oven, though it is very nice for putting it on. Further pro tip: avoid pretty, finished wood peels. Smooth-finished wood makes the dough stick way worse.
I somewhat understand the first, knowing that America has an aversion to mass-based (or even standard volumetric) measurements in recipes, so the alternative really is either an unreasonable number of tablespoons, or an unreasonably precise number of cups.
The latter however is pure nonsense. 'Bread flour', aka 'strong', is so named for relatively high protein content (gluten-producing capability). '00 flour' aka 'super-fine' refers to how finely it's milled; used particularly for pasta and has its proponents for pizza.
Orthogonal concepts. As a substitution chain it basically just reads 'flour' but in a way that implies any speciality is better than plain/'AP'.
Which version of pizza are you talking about? Apple didn't technically invent the first smartphone, and yet it did create and popularize the smartphone as the world knows it today.
The US also didn't actually invent putting cooked beef between two slices of bread. It popularized and spread the hamburger globally. What the world came to know as a hamburger, came from the US.
Pizza, as with so many commercialized things, was popularized around the globe by the US, not by Italy. That's not something up for debate, it's not subtly the case, the US massively popularized pizza as the world knows it today. It wasn't the classic, bland Italian version of 'pizza' that stormed around the world, it was the amped up commercialized US approach to pizza: which involved an epic explosion of variation of every possible sort, delivered by chains. That's what rapidly spread pizza to every corner of the globe post WW2. The US created the modern pizza chain and spread it globally, using its vast economic reach and capital, introducing pizza to billions of people in the process. Pizza was popularized globally by the US in exactly the same way the US popularized hamburgers.
If you're talking about ground beef, yes, they invented. The original prussian tartare steak was uncooked, made with horse meat and not served on bread. The american "Hamburguer steak" was invented in the Port of NY inspired but radically different from the dish served to immigrants coming from the Hamburg port.
> was popularized around the globe by the US, not by Italy.
Just no. São Paulo, Brazil and Buenos Aires, Argentina, already had pizza before Americans "popularized" it, because they have Italian immigrants since the 19th century. And to this day their pizza is closer to the original than to the NY style.
> classic, bland Italian version of 'pizza'
Go to Italy. Go to Sicily, Basilicata, Liguria, Lazio, Sardinia, ... their pizza is very far away from "bland".
I don't think many people here would associate pizza with the US, aside from pan pizza. If asked, people would probably say America invented the cheese-filled crust.
Chains exist, including Pizza Hut and Dominos and a few local ones, but the vast majority of sales are done by small, independent restaurants. Overall, the chain restaurant concept -- thankfully -- hasn't been working out in Germany, beyond bottom tier fast food.
[1] https://www.mainpost.de/aktiv-region/specials/lebeninfranken...
You need to back this up. It is far from obvious.
Do you have any idea how prevalent "chain-pizza" is compared with "locally owned", in countries throughout the world? I hardly believe it was US that spread pizza throughout Europe. It was much more likely migration.
Pizza is thought to be one of those things. Italians had it, New Yorkers went insane for it, and then Italians followed suit and made it a significant cultural identifier.
There’s a lot of things like this.
The article says the same thing.
Nowadays Neapolitan pizza (in Naples) is rarely made with sourdough though. It's usually fresh yeast.
Um, yeah. As a life long New Yorker I, and most anyone I know, are well aware of the origins of pizza. We just happen to have had a large Italian population so we have a lot of pizza.
Put a grill (top-down) on highest heat.
Put a frying pan on a hob on the highest heat.
Stretch out your dough and place it on the frying pan.
Put on sauce, cheese, and toppings.
Couple of minutes later check underneath.
Put the frying pan under the grill for a couple of minutes.
Taa daa. Like it was made in a pizza oven.
I don't do quite all the way as removing all the seeds, but I immersion blend canned San Marzano tomatoes and then strain all the liquid out of it, keeping only the pulp.
https://cdn.bmstores.co.uk/images/hpcProductImage/imgFull/30...
I can't immediately find an image squirting any, but it's about the consistency of toothpaste. Thicker than pesto. Much thicker than passata or anything sold as a 'pasta sauce'.
(Edit, ah - got one - https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/t/some-tomato-puree-comes-out-...)
But anyway, yes, a tomato by any name ~would smell as sweet~ reduced that much to a sort of jam-like consistency.
If anything it's too thick for pizza - but oil's going on anyway right, so I just mix it with a bit (and usually some chopped chillies) and it's perfectly spreadable without being too saucy.
Conversely, I also think a lot of people completely lose themselves in the process and forget when to say "enough is enough". It's just pizza, not some priceless work of art.
I've found a pretty good recipe for pizza in a home oven, it's closer to Pizza Tonda Romana than Neapolitan, hence also similar to NY style pizza.
In baker's percentages, it's high gluten flour and 60-65% water, 1-3% salt, 1-2% olive oil and 0.2-0.5% instant dry yeast. Play around with how wet/dry you think it should be.
The important parts are the olive oil (which helps browning in an ordinary oven), kneading until you can windowpane the dough, and letting it rest portioned and covered at least 12 hours in the fridge.
Shape, top and bake at the highest temp your oven can go, a pizza stone or steel is nice, but not mandatory. A sheet tray or a cast iron pan turned upside down also both work great.
I like making pizza baking a social activity, everyone in the kitchen, selecting toppings and eating the super hot pizza straight out of the oven, while preparing the next one.
Like many things in life, it can be worth it to take a step back and a simpler approach, with a better effort:result factor.
Isn't that highly reductionist? People derive pleasure from immersion and mastery of all sorts of things. I'd argue that food can make you feel just as much, and probably a lot more emotion than typical art does.
But just because you've mastered making a Neapolitan pizza exactly to the specifications and definitions, does not necessarily mean you've succeeded in creating a good pizza.
My point is that some people get so bogged down in minutiae and details, that they completely forget that the entire point was to make something delicious for people to enjoy.
There are good small high-temp pizza oven options. If you care enough about the quality you're heading to something in that space, or building out a brick furnace in the backyard.
I think home pizza is great. I love making it, but its nothing on the stuff i get from the two italian joints up the road, professionals get better results.
Same with coffee: I'd rather pay a competent barista.. But if I lived in the woods in vermont I might feel different: and I'd have room to make a pizza oven too!
If you live in a unit with a wired in oven, and you mod your oven to cook on the clean cycle.. your home insurance is probably void. If you rent: you're probably now in breach of your rental agreement.
Not getting his results, we pre-heat some ceramic (we use a plate but friends went to the hardware store and got a large clay floortile) and this, combined with direct radiant heat from the elements, gets a pretty good outcome: fast cook base and crispy finish on the toppings.
Also: this americanism to refer to Pizza PIE. Thats Chicago, and is abhorrent sloppy nonsense. I've had one. its tomato sauce in a piecrust. its like eating lukewarm dense tomato soup with cheese topping. I can't imagine why people do this except I also gross out on dirty fries so I kind-of get it, its comfort food for the locals. But anywhere else, pizza means thin crust, and arguments about how much beyond basil and cheese goes on it.
(I am australian. I do not put pineapple on pizza. Tandoori Lamb is pretty good mind you.)
Perhaps my most controversial stance is not thinking cheese is all that important as a pizza topping.
My favourite pizza to make is a big mound of spinach (however much you think is way too much will shrink down to nothing) and dollops of ricotta. But if they're not available, I have some grilled vegetables (whatever really) and then find myself grating some cheese on for no reason other than that's what pizza is 'supposed to be like'.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/263732/where-doe...
I've had many fine meals in Chicago. "deep dish" Pizza isn't one of them.
I got ok at making pizza, but not on this guy's level.
He said it, and it's true; it's about the crust.
I have almost completely given up on good bread though. I once heard that the book Julia Child's really valued--La Bonne--didn't have a chapter on making bread. The author said something like the best bread is bought from a good bakery. (It's basically sourdough bread I gave up on.)
https://www.seriouseats.com/bread-baking-sourdough-waffles-r...
After a few months you don't need to feed it anymore. I just put 50 grams in the fridge and forget about it until I run out of bread or decide to bake a loaf for friends. 50 grams makes enough levain for two loaves; I just take 10 grams out of the levain and mix it with 20 grams water and 20 grams flour, let it rise for a day, put it back in the fridge and then forget about it again... Rinse and repeat, no waste.
And I can't eat store bought bread anymore, even the artisan stuff. Which kind of figures, I spend about 30 minutes of actual work on 2 loaves and there's no way a professional operation would spend that much time on theirs.
I've often wondered what it is that does the trick and I'm not entirely sure anyone's theories are quite right. It's probably a few things: high heat for a toasting/char effect, with radiant heat providing some kind of specific heating mechanism. But I also have started wondering if there's something about the humidity that's different in most wood-fired brick ovens.
I'd love to try one of those tabletop pizza ovens but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Those pictures make me want to go out and start churning out pizzas.
Major byproduct of burning hydrocarbons is water. That'll definitely raise the humidity.
First person I knew IRL who regularly referred to it as "pie" (to the amusement of the midwesterners he was working with—that's rare usage here) was a born & bred New Yorker. Americanism, yes, but AFAIK it's not at all confined to, or even resulting from, either of Chicago's major pizza styles.
Also, TIL the word "poolish."
If you are in a restaurant kitchen or you know your yeast is good because you bought it recently then yes you don't need to proof your yeast.
Dry active (as opposed to instant) yeast is not shelf stable, if you have to use it, always proof it.
I'd only advise somebody to bother to proof if they know the yeast I'm using is older than a few months opened unrefrigerated, but I habitually check it anyway.
But if any home cook simply reads "you don't need to proof yeast" and interprets it as another one of those cooking myths like 'sealing' a steak, they are likely to make a catastrophic mistake one day.
Yeah, those are the kind of people who need to proof the yeast. What is it doing in the cupboard?
Proofing can't hurt and is good advise, but at some point you learn you can get away without.
I haven't bothered to proof yeast in a decade. I'm no pro, but we do make all of our pizza, bread, buns, rolls, pretzels, etc.
I buy big compressed blocks and store them in the freezer. When one is opened, some goes in a small jar in the refrigerator and the rest in a large jar in the freezer.
I will say that personally, I treat Good pizza, like this or a "tomato pie" from a great place, as a fundamentally different thing from "Bad" pizza, the kind your cheap local chain sells. (Fast food pizza from Domino's or whomever is just not something I normally consume.) There is a place in the world for "bad", bready pizza with crazy toppings and whatever else. It just isn't what I want when I want the Good stuff.
One of his oven hacks I remember is getting plain tiles from a flooring wholesaler (be careful, you can't just get any kind and I don't have the book handy to look it up) and line the oven with them to retain heat and increase the temp.
This post is one of those rare hidden gems that make you go "OH YEAH! Forgot about that! What am I waiting for!"
Here's a profile:
+--------------+
+--------------------+ +---------------+ |
| Top Pizza Stone |<--+ | | |
+--------------------+ | +-----------------------------------------+ | |
+----+-----------------------------------------+-----+---------+-----+ |
+--------------------+ .-----------------------------------. | | |
| PIZZA! |<---------( ) | | |
+--------------------+ `-----------------------------------' +---------------+ | <--These are
+-----------------------------------------+ | | | all brick
+--------------------+ +----+-----------------------------------------+ | | |
| Bottom Pizza Stone |<--+ +-----------------------------------------+ +---------------+ |
+--------------------+ | | | | Note the gap
| | | |at the back of
| X X +-----+---------+-----+ | the bottom
| X / \ X / \X | | | pizza stone
| / \/ \ \ / \\ | | |
+--->| / | | | |\ +---------------+ |
+--------------------+ | | | \ / \ / | | | |
| Fire Box |---+ | \ /\ / / \ / / | | |
+--------------------+ | +----\ /--V-\ /---V\ /--+ +---------------+ |
| +-----V------V------V---+ | | |
| | | |
+-----------------------------------------+---------------+ +--------------+
+---------------+ Upper stone +---------------+
| +-----------------------------------------+ |
| +-----------------------------------------+ |
+---------------+ .-----------------------------------. +---------------+
| | ( PIZZA! ) | |
| | `-----------------------------------' | |
+---------------+-----------------------------------------+---------------+
+---------------+-----------------------------------------+---------------+
| Bricks! | Lower stone | Bricks! |
| | | |
+---------------+ X X +---------------+
| | X / \ X / \X | |
| | / \/ \ \ / \\ | |
+---------------+ / | FIRE! |\ +---------------+
| | | \ / \ / | | |
| | \ /\ / / \ / / | |
+---------------+ +----\ /--V-\ /---V\ /--+ +---------------+
| | +-----V------V------V---+ | |
| | | |
+---------------+-----------------------------------------+---------------+
Try to use as few bricks as possible - say 30, but extra points for as few as you require to build
Square pizza stones are easier to build with - but round can work too
Takes about 25 minutes to get to temperature of 800f but careful, it can get to much more and your pizza with simply burn
Fire brick takes much longer to heat to temp
Wood peel to place pizza and metal peel for taking out
Rebuild often and without reason
So, we are going to read and follow the recipe of endemic Naples, Italy pizza by some talented chef from New York? I don't get it, what's the point? Can we please have one from Naples, Italy chef?