Pizza

There are only two types of Pizza, thin and deep dish. Anything else claiming to be pizza is poor imitation.

Deep dish pizza must be properly deep, 3/4 inch minimum. If your deep dish pizza is cooked through in less than half an hour you are being lied to about it's deepness.  

Geno's East of Chicago are proper preparers of this type of pizza perfection. And I suggest all who wish to reach enlightenment study here. Come hungry and patient. Long hair and Bourbon Sour are optional.


I do not pretend to  compete with Chicago's pizza in my home kitchen. I practice the art of thin crust at home.  And as there are rules for deep dish, so must you follow the One Commandment of thin crust pizza; No Bending.

Thin crust pizza must have a crisp crust, if it is flexible enough to bend, then you have a soggy crust. No doubt those who are members to the cult of New York style pizza will disagree with me here.

  

I ate at John's Pizzeria in New York. and it was quite good, other than the soggy, flimsy crust.  No that I have offend millions of people; on to the discussion of pizza cooking hardware.

While I would love to have a wood fired, brick oven to cook my pizza,  my bank account and local zoning laws do not support that. 

So the a ceramic Pizza Stone is the nearest many will come to that goal. I have owned two such devices, and as shown above, they both cracked. They are also impossible to scrub the little bits of burnt cheese off.  The self clean function of a modern over is very effective at carbonizing all mozzarella remains off of a pizza stone. That same function also works well to turn one pizza stone into multiple small stones, as I found out with my first model.

Given the severe limitations of a ceramic pizza stone, I purchased a Baking Steel from Stoughton Steel. Basically a laser cut plate of 1/2 inch thick mild steel. No doubt Stoughton has a great margin on these things, but fools like I buy them, so more power too them.

This  30 lbs hunk of steel lives in the bottom of my oven. I did try to place it on a rack, but the bow the rack took was concerning.  Preheat oven for half an hour at 550*f, then switch the broiler on and you are ready to enter Crispy Crust Nirvana.