17 hours ago, boilsover said:Hi, Scott:
I have a 1/2" steel cut to the size of my oven (minus 1" all the way around). I like it a lot, and it's not all that hard to move around. I generally agree with your enumerated points.
However... my only issue with the 1/2" and the bake speed it allows is that the topping finish lags behind the crust bottom. Raising the rack to its highest possible position and switching to High Broil helps, but it's still always a tossup whether my 3 minute pie will be a black panther underneath before the toppings finish.
This may be a weak broiler element, but even so, I can't be the only cook out here with that limitation.
If I had it to do over again, I would split the difference and have a 3/8" sheet cut. For my oven, I think that would be striking a non-obsessive's balance. It might even afford a little extra room to load/unload.
Steel, as I'm sure you're aware, is a bottom heat accelerator. If you speed up the rate that the bottom bakes, you have to give the top of the pizza more heat as well- in the form of broiling. In the decade or so that steel plate has been used for pizza, very little has been mentioned regarding broiling. Nathan Myhrvold/Chris Young (Modernist Cuisine) bring it up very briefly, But Andris Lagsdin (the owner of Baking Steel) and Kenji have steered clear of the topic entirely. This omission has been unbelievably damaging to the home pizza making community because of the number of broilerless oven owners who have purchased steel and been left with a door stop. I've done my best to educate people, but my voice only carries so far. Beyond the damage to broilerless oven owners, this broiler agnostic approach has done a terrible disservice to weak broiler owners like yourself. The misinformation being parroted time and time again is "purchase steel and make Neapolitan pizza at home."
Tangential soap box aside, you can't squeeze blood from a stone. Just because you can use steel to bake the bottom of your pizza in, say, as little as 2.5 minutes, it doesn't mean that your oven is capable of a balanced 2.5 minute bake. Your broiler is obviously the weakest link in the equation. If it's only capable of getting good top color in, say, 4 minutes, then you have to dial back the bottom heat- and I'm not sure handicapping the steel by going thinner is the answer. Based upon the black you're seeing in 3 minutes, it sounds a lot like you're pre-heating the steel as high as your oven will go. Again, this is another area where the 'experts' get it wrong. If you heat your oven as hot as it will get, when you go and try to turn on the broiler, the thermostat will prevent the broiler from going on. Eventually the oven might cool enough for the broiler to kick in, but how long this will take will be a crap shoot, which, in turn, will produce the erratic results that you're seeing.
In order to effectively use a broiler during the bake, you need to pre-heat the oven to a low enough temperature that the broiler will both kick in when you turn it on- and stay on for as long as you need it. For some ovens, this may be a drop in 25 degrees, but there's a chance you may need more. You can try cracking the door during the bake to help the broiler stay on, but I've found that cracking the door compounds the issue with the back of the pizza taking on a lot more color- which is obviously mitigated with turns, but if the back/front heat balance is too far out of wack, it can take a lot of turns to get even color.
In other words, if your broiler is kicking in erratically like it sounds like it's doing, then it will be just as erratic with 3/8" steel preheated to the max as it is with 1/2" and your results will continue to be inconsistent. The answer isn't a thinner plate, but a lower pre-heat temp.
As you dial down the heat, this will extend your bake time a bit, and you're going to move out of the 2.5 minute territory. That may not be a horrible thing. If you read my post above, I said that 4 minutes is better than 6, but I didn't say that 2 minutes is better than 4 
Sub 90 second Neapolitan pizza is phenomenal, but if you can't hit a 90 second balanced bake, which I guarantee you that you can't, 4+ minute NY style is generally thought to be far superior to the no man's land between 2 and 4 minutes. Now, you can get a bit more Neapolitan-ish char on the undercrust in 3 - 3.5 minutes, and a handful of people enjoy that, but, you'll only know if you can achieve something like that after you've dialed the pre-heat temp down until the broiler starts cooperating. With your broiler, a non blackened but properly charred 3 minute undercrust with good top color may not be possible.
On another note, the 1" gap on all sides to allow for air flow... If anyone is considering cutting their steel like this, please don't. You need a gap for air flow, but you don't need it on all sides. You only need a gap on two sides, which allows you to go all the way from the back wall to almost touching the door, which, in turn, buys you incredibly precious circular real estate. My Steel Plate Buying Guide provides all the details for ideal sizing (for the obsessive, of course 
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