On 9/20/2017 at 7:31 AM, pastryani said:
Here's a review by Kenji Lopez-Alt:
http://slice.seriouseats.com/archives/2012/09/the-pizza-lab-the-baking-steel-delivers.html
He brings up a good point (as others have here) that the weight of the 1/2" is 30 lbs, so it's not very portable and you'd have to make sure your oven could support that. I have the 1/4" and it does a great job. I think the 1/2" would retain more heat but that alone would not motivate me to get it. I do back-to-back pizzas with the 1/4" without issue (without having to wait for the steel to heat back up) and the portability of the 1/4" 15-pounder is important to me.
I know I've read another article that does a direct comparison between the two but I can't find it right now. The gist of it was that if you have an oven that can support the 30 lbs AND can be solely dedicated to pizza making (so that you could leave the steel in the oven at all times and not have to move it) AND you don't mind paying more for it, then the 1/2" will yield slightly better results. Otherwise, the 1/4" does a darn good job with nominal differences.
A few things.
1. Kenji targets a very non obsessive audience. For the obsessive, everything comes down to bake time with pizza. As you slow down the bake, the dough doesn't puff up as much and it dries out and takes on a stale quality. 8 minutes is better than a 10 minute bake, 6 is better than 8, 4 is better than 6- for most obsessives. The thickness of the steel relates directly to thermal mass, and thermal mass impacts bake time. A 1/4" steel won't bake as fast of a pizza as 1/2" will. For a non obsessive, this may not be the end of the world. At the same time, though, it's pretty much impossible to know whether or not one is ever going get the pizza bug, and should that occur, if they're stuck with a 1/4" product, it's not going to cut it.
Steel, by it's nature, is an advanced pizza baking tool. It's almost always the device that people reach for after they've worked with stone a bit and want to take it to the next level. The worst thing someone in those shoes could do, though, is rather than strive for the ultimate, would be to settle for a slight improvement (if any) with 1/4."
2. Another obsessive aspect of steel is length and width. The beginner may be perfectly fine with 13" pizzas, but, as you up your game, you absolutely want to share your works of art with the rest of the world, and, when you do, in order to serve a larger number of people, you need as much real estate as you can get. I've done parties that required six 17" pies in about an hour. That kind of output only happens with a 17 x 17 x .5 steel.
3. A single 30 lb. steel (or, preferably, a 40 lb steel) is very far from portable, but if you get it cut in half, the resulting pieces are a heck of a lot more manageable. In theory, if someone had a health issue and had trouble lifting a 20 lb. steel into place, they could cut the initial steel into thirds. One important aspect is that oven shelves have a tendency to bow a bit in the middle, so you want the seam(s) to run against the bow, not with it.
4. Domestic oven shelves, by their nature, are built to support 25+ lb. Thanksgiving turkeys, inside heavy baking pans, with vegetables and stuffing. 40 lb. is no problem whatsoever for your average oven shelf. During the last decade, I know at least 200 people who've purchased 40 lb+ steels and no one has ever complained about an oven shelf breaking. Believe me, if this were a potential issue, some one would have experienced it, and they would have scream bloody murder. They haven't. The shelf, as I said, will bend a bit, some a bit more than others, but it will not break, and, when you remove the steel, the shelf will bounce back to it's original shape.
