4 hours ago, weinoo said:Why remove it?
The steel currently in my oven weighs close to 25 lbs...it's annoying enough removing it when cold.
I baked cookies on a cookie sheet on it yesterday, and the new One Tin Bakes (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) book I just got suggests baking in the tin on a steel/brick/whatever.
My steel is 41 lb, so I spent a great deal of effort trying to make leaving it in the oven work for other baked goods. I couldn't do it. Tall pots, like dutch ovens, stockpots, or large roasts wouldn't fit vertically with where my steel is placed. For things that could fit, like pies, cookies or lasagna, I could usually modify the baking technique to get the results I wanted, but, for every success, it would take at least 2 bakes to dial it in. At the end of the day, it changes the thermodynamics so dramatically the futzing that it requires is not worth the trouble. And there is no single trick to making every baked good work. Every item I baked required different tweaks to get it to bake the way I wanted.
Another important facet to this equation is, until the steel is completely preheated, the cooler core is going to be actively drawing heat away from the hotter exterior, effectively acting like a heat sink and lowering the temp of the oven faster than normally. Because of this, unless you fully preheat the steel every time you bake, your oven temp won't be consistent. This turns (for me) a typical 12 minute preheat into an hour. For thinner steels, you're still talking 40+ minutes.
A few caveats. First, I'm working with an oven without convection. If all your recipes utilize convection, and you're willing to live with the 40+ minute preheat, as long as you don't bake directly on the steel, you shouldn't have to alter your approach for existing recipes. Second, this is for existing recipes, not new ones. By their nature, new recipes tend to require some trial and error with regard to how they're baked. Within that context, compensating for the steel is probably not that much extra bother. But again, that 40+ minute preheat is brutal.
Not to sound like a broken record, but this is the beauty of aluminum. Besides producing better bottom color and superior oven spring, aluminum with comparable heat capacity is a little more than 1/2 the weight of steel. Better pizza, and your back breaking 23 lb plate becomes a much more manageable 14 lb piece of aluminum. I don't normally recommend less than .75" aluminum, but that's for folks with cooler ovens. I'm also not a fan of anything less than 16" square (size is a huge factor in proper NY style pies). This all being said, your oven is really not that weak. If you wanted to approach aluminum from primarily a back saving perspective, a 15" x 15" x .625" plate from the link I posted above would match the heat capacity you have now (with a slightly faster bake time), weigh 14 lb and run you $60 shipped. If you wanted to approach the weight savings even more aggressively and increase performance, two 16" x 8" x .75" aluminum plates would blow your current steel out of the water, weigh 9 lb a piece, and run you about $75 shipped.
Considerably better pizza AND lugging around 9 lb plates rather than 23 lb. You have to be at least a little bit tempted 
