7 hours ago, paulraphael said:
My purism is about the pizza being awesome and have certain qualities I like. It's not about following arbitrary rules, whether the AVPN's or anyone else's. And I precisely mean taking pizza in a "Neapolitan direction." Because the best pizza I've had has been a hybrid style. I've had purist AVPN-compliant pizza, and I've had variations that I think of as "Brooklyn Neapolitan," and I like the latter better. So that's what I go for.
The differences aren't relevant to my points above, because the Brooklyn variations are no easier to make, and are just as demanding of a blazing hot oven.
With the right kind of home oven, however, people have been able to get into 90-ish second territory. Because the high-powered infra-red broilers on the pro-sumer ranges kick out serious energy. Between this and the heat capacity/conductivity of a 30lb slab of steel, you can recreate wood oven conditions.
Incidentally, the Modernist Cuisine crew has put to rest the idea that there's anything magical about a wood-fired oven (besides ambience). It doesn't matter what the heat source is. As long as you have enough power, and can balance the conductive energy delivery from the deck and the radiative energy delivery from above, you can do anything. Including a perfect Neapolitan pie. Even if VPN rules say you have to use wood. People who have hacked their home ovens to cook on the self-clean cycle figured this out decades ago.
Within the last 15 years, I've come across maybe 3,000 people who've tried making Neapolitan pizza at home. Do you know how many of these people had the 'right kind of home oven?' Three. Yes, it's possible to make Neapolitan in a home oven, but framing conversations in the context of a 1 in 1000 chance for success doesn't serve the home pizza maker. Had you said, 'taking pizza in a Neapolitan direction with the right oven', I would have agreed with you. But you made the implication that home cooks can strive for Neapolitan- all home cooks and that this direction is somehow okay. Considering your vast exposure to 60 second pizza and your innate knowledge of it's superiority (as compared to unmalted flour dough baked for 4 minutes), if anyone would be able to grasp the concept that it's absolutely not okay for the vast number of home cooks to strive for Neapolitan, it should be you.
There's hybrid toppings but, as you pointed out, there are no hybrid bake times. I've talked with Paulie Gee (king of the Brooklyn Neapolitan, imo) extensively about this,and he understands it unequivocally. If you lower the heat and extend the bake time with a Neapolitan dough, it suffers.
And self clean cycles, besides being potentially oven damaging and dangerous, have no correlation to making Neapolitan pizza at home. You said it yourself, it's all down to the broiler, and, if the broiler is too weak at 550 (which pretty much all home oven broilers are), it will still be too weak at 700.
