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31
BAKING PIZZA AT HOME
Why cook pizza at high temperatures?
It's a little bit like popcorn. Popcorn needs extreme heat for the moisture inside the kernel to convert to
steam, expanding rapidly and exploding the outer hull. If you cooked popcorn at a low temp, it would dry
out and never pop.
With pizza, you don't have a hull containing this pressure, but the pressure of the expanding gases is still
vital to the volume achieved in the baked product. Without intense heat, the gases don't expand as rapidly
and you don't achieve the same volume/oven spring. Longer bakes produce denser crumbs. Dense
crumbs are perfectly fine for bagels, but, for pizza, you want puff.
As you get into more advanced home pizza making, you learn that temperature is relative. It becomes
less about high temps and more about high heat transfer and increased thermal mass. Certain materials
conduct heat faster, so a thin ceramic tile may give you a mediocre 12 minute bake at 550°, while a 3/4"
thick baking stone will give you phenomenal puffy pizza in 5 minutes.
The limits are raw dough. As you increase the heat transfer rate, you'll hit a point where the outside of the
crust is cooked but the inside is still raw. In fast baked Neapolitan pizza, this is called a gum line, and,
while some people like that little raw-ness, it is generally considered a defect.
Experimentation is the key to success. Try different temperatures, different times, and different dough
recipes until you find the combination that you like the best. It is a good idea to write down the different
combinations you experiment with so you can repeat them in the future.
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