Baking Pizza on a Metal Plate/Baking Steel

[rotuts]

@weinoo 

 

nice 

 

do you have the URL

 

for tha Pizza Steel ?

 

may friend has the gas pizza ovwn

 

and might like to see the peel.

[weinoo]

3 hours ago, rotuts said:

@weinoo 

 

nice 

 

do you have the URL

 

for tha Pizza Steel ?

 

may friend has the gas pizza ovwn

 

and might like to see the peel.

 

This one came from Amazon, which unsurprisingly has a ton of peels.

[paul o' vendange]

On 1/11/2021 at 9:55 AM, weinoo said:

 

I'm no food scientist or heat scientist (my mother thought I'd make a good vet), and I'm sure we'll hear from them...

 

I think the way the steel affects heat in the oven is that it keeps the heat more consistent.  Baking on top of the steel is I guess like baking on an oven floor, so I imagine some experimentation will be necessary, but I didn't find much difference with these cookies, and Edd (yes, that is how he spells his name) in the one tin baking book says that it helps some of what he bakes from getting a soggy bottom crust.

 

When I roasted chicken thighs underneath the steel (after it had heated properly), they crisped up quite beautifully.  My oven maintains quite accurate heat, according to the thermometers I have in there, and I would think if an oven is squirrely, the steel can only help.

 

I am no scientist either but yep, we’re talking thermal mass.  Your plate retains heat better than a stone has greater mass still.   One benefit,  I believe. Is to act as a bit more of a buffer - every time we open the door the temp drops dramatically but it’s less of a problem with bakes on material of higher thermal mass than lower mass.

 

I can’t speak for Anova as I’ve never used one.  My oven gets a warmup, with cast iron steel Dutch oven if applicable, or stone itself when doing bakes with barards  or any other longer breads like baguettes.  In this second case, I set up a cookie sheet with rolled up kitchen towels, heavily soaked prior to being put in the heat oven.

 

Regardless,  I have a hotel pan full of lava rocks which hit with water just prior to baking .

 

Anova is a steam oven, right?  If so I can’t speak to anything else but f higher or lower higher mass. 

[weinoo]

1 hour ago, paul o' vendange said:

Regardless,  I have a hotel pan full of lava rocks which hit with water just prior to baking

That must be quite a blast of steam!

[paul o' vendange]

23 minutes ago, weinoo said:

That must be quite a blast of steam!

Lol, yep, pretty peppy bit of steam.  That steam goes so quickly, but I want to do what I can to keep a humid environment.  I forgot to mention I toss a couple of ice cubes at T-15 to also lend to a good start.  

 

The sheet of soaked towels goes in right at preheat (I’ve always gone an hour for preheating.  Oven may be there but I want to make sure the stone or Dutch oven are fully at temp).  The towels perform like champs. See plenty of steam coming up till I pull sheet or the cloche lid, 20 minutes.  Even with the fact the oven constantly vents.

 

Ideas aren’t mine.  Sort of a hybrid of Hamelman and Tartine.

Edited February 12, 2021 by paul o' vendange (log)

[Bernie]

The thermal mass matters...BUT

Consider a brick lined oven. The bricks will retain the heat but they will also transfer the heat to the air in the oven and with a big surface area it will do it nicely.

But heat travels relatively slowly through the bricks.

You put your pizza in the oven on the bricks and the hot air starts the cooking but the that you are getting quite a bit of radiation from the bricks.

The part of the pizza in contact with the bricks initially gets its heat from the bricks but it cools the surface of the bricks and the slow transfer of heat means it cooks the pizza relatively slowly, there is little heat radiation involved.

 

Now replace the bricks with steel (with a decent thickness).

The same processes happens. The steel gives up its heat to the air a much quicker, the radiation is about the same.

The part of the pizza in contact with the steel initially gets the heat from the steel and cools it, but because heat transfer through steel is much faster than the brick, the steel rapidly heats back up and you are likely to burn the base of the pizza. But the cooking of the rest was much quicker because the air is heating up much faster, so the whole may cook before the base burns.

 

A steel plate alone in a normal oven does the same sort of thing, but it provides almost no radiation to the top of the pizza, you are relying on the radiation of the normal oven, but the air heats up quicker from the steel.

 

So its all sort of confusing. The steel plate means you probably need to run the oven cooler, at least initially. Perhaps its better to run 2 steel plates one at the top of the oven one at the bottom to put the pizza on, or just have a single (substantial plate) to provide thermal mass but don't put the pizza on it directly.

 

What I use is a round pizza stone (from Aldi). I tried heating it much hotter over gas and then putting the hot stone in the preheated oven (Don't drink if you are going to attempt this!). The pizza burned on the base before it was cooked like I like it.

Now I just use the stone preheated to ~230 C then turn the oven flat out when I put the pizza directly on it. Works OK, better than the pizza in a normal tray in the normal oven which cooks the top before the bottom and I end up with a soggy bottom.

I think it is all trial and error, because it depends as much on your oven, dough and toppings. Ideal is a brick lined wood fired oven. That way the air is really really  hot and the bricks are not as hot but uniform and have a good heat mass. It also carries away the moisture as it cooks.

 

[paul o' vendange]

I don’t disagree.  Bernie’s right and we are talking thermal conductivity in addition to thermal mass.  It’s nigh just impossible to replicate the bake from a brick pizza and and home, no matter what we do.  So we do what we can.  I’ve found steel is just not very good compared to my results obtained using either a stone and an array of saturated linen, or a cast iron cloche as advocated by the Tartine approach.  I should note I’m talking about levain only, not pastries.

 

if folks haven’t read it but are interested, the late Alan Scott was a guru behind a resurgent interest in traditional brick ovens.  See The Bread Builders.  

 

Mud ovens, too, are pretty wonderful. There’s some cultural anthro study out there re the traditional mud ovens of Quebec, 16th century on.  Forget it’s name, but it’s somewhere and fascinating.

 

At any rate, this is pretty far off Anova, apologies.  Just wanted to share my experience.  Will beg off now.

Edited February 13, 2021 by paul o' vendange (log)

[jimb0]

i'm able to get my steel up to around 300C or so. i keep it on the top rack when i'm doing pizza, then just before the pizza goes in the oven i turn on the top broiler. between the two, i can get a small pizza done in 2-3 minutes, which i think is pretty respectable for a standard home oven. 

[weinoo]

My steel does get moved to the top rack for pizza making (though my top oven shelf is actually the second rack down). The broiler is quite intense in my oven, so I turn on the broiler for a few minutes before launching the pizza, and then switch it back to bake when the pie goes in.  Then back to broil for a final minute. It's all a trial and error thing for me - I'm sitting at around 5 to 5.5 minutes. I did notice the other day (I don't look too hard) that the thermometers I have in the oven were showing around 550F - I haven't checked the steel with a laser recently.

 

As I say to my lovely co-eater, the pizza I'm making at home may not be as great as Anthony's at Una Pizza, or the NY style pie at Louie & Ernie's or Patsy's et al.  But it's probably better, and for sure using better ingredients, than 95% of what's out there. That works for us.

 

Of course, once summer rolls around and I refuse to turn on the oven - nothing will work!

[jaymer]

On 1/10/2021 at 6:03 PM, scott123 said:

stuff about pizza...

 

 

Despite the other guy with foul language and an attitude, I wanted to say how much I appreciate your tips and suggestions!

And I'd send that 5:30 pizza (on Page 2) back - but what do I know? I don't have a ton of posts under my name!

[weinoo]

30 minutes ago, jaymer said:

 

Despite the other guy with foul language and an attitude, I wanted to say how much I appreciate your tips and suggestions!

And I'd send that 5:30 pizza (on Page 2) back - but what do I know? I don't have a ton of posts under my name!

No one wants to go scrolling, man...give us the fucking link...

 

By the way, the link in your signature, @jaymer...not working.

Edited February 15, 2021 by weinoo (log)

[paul o' vendange]

Guys, 

 

Just to chime in on pizza, if people haven’t watched it, man the Stanley Tucci in Italy event on CNN is out of this world.  First one last night in Naples, origins of pizza, Amalfi Coast.

[Bernie]

Well i just found this https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1806/1806.08790.pdf

Its a bit long winded but there are a few interesting temperature discussions. Then it gets technical and my eyes  glazed over and I decided I would have pork instead.

Some one might be able to make sense of it all though.

[JoNorvelleWalker]

1 hour ago, Bernie said:

Well i just found this https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1806/1806.08790.pdf

Its a bit long winded but there are a few interesting temperature discussions. Then it gets technical and my eyes  glazed over and I decided I would have pork instead.

Some one might be able to make sense of it all though.

 

Interesting discussion.  I have a graduate degree in this stuff and my eyes glazed over too.  But then I haven't been to Naples in not quite half a century.  And when I was in Naples I never saw a pizza.  I once had pizza in Genoa but, please forgive me, it was awful.  All I can say is that with my modest 550F apartment electric oven and my one inch thick aluminum I can bake a 90 second pizza that is pretty good.  I live in what was once walking distance of Trenton, and an Italian American friend from Trenton reports that the best pizza is German.  They put mustard in the dough.

 

Waiting patiently for @nathanm to get off the pot and for Modernist Pizza to be published.

 

 

 

Edit:  and now I am off to cook my porkchop.

 

Edited February 16, 2021 by JoNorvelleWalker (log)

[Katie Meadow]

2 hours ago, paul o' vendange said:

Guys, 

 

Just to chime in on pizza, if people haven’t watched it, man the Stanley Tucci in Italy event on CNN is out of this world.  First one last night in Naples, origins of pizza, Amalfi Coast.

One of my addictions during the pandemic was reading Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet. So I watched that first episode of Tucci to help with my withdrawal. In the books, the young protagonists, who live in the poorer part of Naples, go out to eat rarely, and when they do, it's for pizza; affordable and fast. For vacation they hop on over to the island of Ischia, so that was a bonus on the show I wasn't expecting. And I do mean hop. It seems that in Ischia the hills are alive.... with rabbits! So those of you following the bunny thread will be interested to know how the charming beyond words restaurant gets its supply.

 

The pizza, by the way, cooks in under a minute. Help me out here: it's foldable, like a NY pizza. Is 45 seconds really enough, even if baked on the side of Vesuvius?

[weinoo]

7 hours ago, Katie Meadow said:

Is 45 seconds really enough, even if baked on the side of Vesuvius?

 

That's a good question...seemed to be pretty warm close to Vesuvius.

 

 

8 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:

All I can say is that with my modest 550F apartment electric oven and my one inch thick aluminum I can bake a 90 second pizza that is pretty good. 

Really?!! Have you shown us this?

[JoNorvelleWalker]

17 hours ago, weinoo said:

Really?!! Have you shown us this?

 

Not sure if you are serious, but the dinner thread is always a good place to start...

 

https://forums.egullet.org/topic/160121-dinner-2020/?do=findComment&comment=2232930

 

[weinoo]

6 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:

Not sure if you are serious, but the dinner thread is always a good place to start...

 

Of course I was!

 

[scott123]

On 2/15/2021 at 5:54 PM, jaymer said:

I wanted to say how much I appreciate your tips and suggestions!

 

Thank you for your kind words.  I'm happy to help!

Steven Shaw, founder of this community used to talk about being hard on ideas, but soft on people (or something to that effect).  It doesn't have to be, but a homemade pizza is an extension of the person who made it, so being hard on homemade pizzas is, to an extent, being hard on people. There are plenty of ideas worth being hard on within these walls (so SO many ideas ), but homemade pizzas should probably be off limits.

[Chris Hennes]

On 2/13/2021 at 6:00 AM, weinoo said:

As I say to my lovely co-eater, the pizza I'm making at home may not be as great as Anthony's at Una Pizza, or the NY style pie at Louie & Ernie's or Patsy's et al.  But it's probably better, and for sure using better ingredients, than 95% of what's out there.

I betcha that number's more like 99%, or even 99.9%. There is a lot of mediocre pizza in the world, even in NYC  . Someone making a home pie who actually gives a damn is going to beat almost all of it, even if they don't quite hit the absolute highs of the best places. 

[weinoo]

So true, @Chris Hennes, so true!

 

A week or two ago I received an email from King Arthur touting a discount...who can let something like that slip away?!  So in addition to a number of other items I purchased (did I really need a King Arthur coffee mug?  Well, it put me over the limit to qualify for the discount, so...), I bought a bag of...

 

 

And set out to make pizza yesterday, strictly following the instructions on the back of the bag. I wish they'd listed the protein content of this flour somewhere.

 

This first pie came in at about 4 minutes, after preheating the steel for an hour and then turning on the broiler for a good 10 minutes...

 

 

And was quite good. But it was the second pie, baked for an additional minute and a half, which really hit the spot...

 

 

I didn't have a lot of mozzarella, so I made if half cheese, half plain. And I used a bit more sauce than I normally do, this one a jar of my favorite stuff from Gustiamo blended with a can of Muir Glen chopped tomatoes, some olive oil and salt.

 

 

 

I guess I'd call it somewhere in-between Neapolitan and NY style, as it was not soupy as some Neapolitan pies can be, and more tender than some NY style pies might be - less crispy, that is, other than that crust rim.  Quite good.

[Anna N]

30 minutes ago, weinoo said:

I wish they'd listed the protein content of this flour somewhere.

 

I believe you can work that out. Here.

[shain]

1 hour ago, weinoo said:

I wish they'd listed the protein content of this flour somewhere.

 

Remember that protein content is not the same as gluten content. You can have high protein flour with low gluten and vice versa. Though there's probably a corellation.

[weinoo]

1 hour ago, Anna N said:

I believe you can work that out. Here.

True. But now, on other bags of flour, they’re giving a quite precise percentage of protein.  Using the formulae certainly gives a broader range of percentages. 

[rotuts]

if you called KAF

 

Id bet they would look it up for you