By freeing yourself from the lust for mythical stones and mystical ovens, you have all the pizza magic you need.

Yesterday, I unwittingly wandered into the place where pizza joy goes to die: a group filled with self-assured social-media pizza experts. Trying to be useful, I ended up losing sleep.
 
This particular group is dedicated to the secrets of a certain style of regional pizza. There’s lots of chest-thumping pizza chauvinism in there. People make statements like, “Yeah, maybe it’s tasty—but that’s not how they do it in [INSERT NAME OF CITY HERE].”
 
I could name the city—but such things happen all over pizza social. There is discrimination against neither style nor geography. I don’t want to make it sound like this one pizza place online is unique. This special fervor is universal.
 
It’s also easy to fall victim to absolutists spreading mythologies about elusive butterflies of pizza-making that are utter glibbertygok. (Don’t bother googling that word. I already tried. It doesn't exist.)
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I sat there for many, many minutes I will never get back. I was trying to formulate a response that didn’t sound like an accusation, or some kind of finger pointing, or my own brand of know-it-all-ism. The gentleman posting seems well-intentioned—a smart guy who believes he has stumbled upon an Historic Pizza Truth. 
 
And as I sat there not responding, the social media discourse began to flow like that fabled New York Water into the giant steel bowl of a Manhattan pizzeria’s stand-mixer.
 
“Flour oils? I don’t think so!”
 
“This makes perfect sense!”
 
“No it doesn’t!”
 
“Don’t you believe seasoning something historically leads to different flavors? Look at cooking in cast iron!”
 
“Bah! Dogs and cats!”
 
I finally walked away from this dizzying discourse, frustrated.
 

One of my goals in being a self-styled pizza pundit is to be useful, and I wasn’t seeing how to do that. That was around 10pm. I went to bed thinking, “I really need to make dough” as I resumed reading that uplifting and lighthearted page-turner, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment. (The Katz translation is quite readable. But still, in 1866 St. Petersburg…no pizza.)
 
This morning at 3:30am, I woke and began writing what you’re reading now—until stumbling upon an appropriate reply for our stone-struck social media friend. Here now, a reasonable facsimile of that comment:
 
 
“I have several well-seasoned cordierite pizza stones if anybody wants to lick one and see how it tastes.
 
“I’m not a scientist. I’m not even smart enough to use the phrase ‘oven thermodynamics’ without feeling like a fraud. But this mythology of Pizza City’s Oven Stones seems unlikely.
 
“By subjecting oils to high heat on cordierite, they’re going to polymerize in the stone much as they do on cast iron. You’re going to end up with a hydrophobic coating that imparts zero flavor.
 
 
“Seasoning cookware is not about flavor, but about function. Seasoning cast iron is about creating a nonstick surface. Seasoning a baking stone is about creating a thermal mass that’s reliable under high heat.
 
“What imparts flavor to a pizza is ingredients and tools in the hands of a knowledgeable pizzamaker.
 
“Like a famous pizzaiolo has said when asked about his secret ingredient: ‘I dunno. It’s me. I guess the secret ingredient is me.’”
 


This “secret” paradigm is applicable to all kinds of industries and avocations. Some people, especially novices, get hung up on equipment and mythologies.
 
Other people start digging enough and practicing enough and branching out enough and paying enough attention to actual, authoritative sources and their own successes and disasters that in spite of their competencies, they begin to realize how little they really know.
 
See also: a ne’er-do-well like me.
 
 
In my first years of making pizza, I knew everything.
 
Now, over 20 years into this thing called pizza, with a library of almost 50 pizza books—including the epic, 3-volume monster entitled Modernist Pizza, which is so heavy that after delivering it, my mail carrier may have required outpatient surgery for hernia, and which I’ve read cover to cover, an act for which I’m still recovering from the mental herniation—and with easily over 1,000 homemade pizzas to my credit, I finally understand how much I don’t know.
 
And I’m now here to break the sad news. Ready?  
 
 
“Oven” is not a flavor. There. I said it. Ovens are about thermodynamics. That’s all. Physics is very unsexy. 
 
Whatever style of pizza you want to make, there’s an oven that has just the right thermodynamics for it. And there’s another oven that’s a good compromise for making that style of pizza. And there’s yet another style of oven that is just wrong. (Thank you, Modernist Pizza, for the useful comparative discussion about ovens, complete with an accompanying chart.)
 
When we're talking ovens, we’re talking about thermodynamics in action.
 
Pizza ovens are not magical. They’re a lot of fun. But they won’t make the pizza for you. 
 
 
Moreover, The Mystical Church Of The Pizza Oven’s endless mythology might make you crazy.
 
Become an adherent, and you’ll always be seeking the next magical component—the next elusive butterfly of the perfect pizza which doesn’t exist.
 
You can relax and not join the church. Or you can become a supplicant and start spouting nonsense like “Using fruitwood in your oven makes your pizza more flavorful.” I know a knucklehead who used to spout such nonsense. He looked a lot like me. (Color the younger me occasionally cringe-worthy.)
 
Look inside that raging-hot dome oven. See that little pizza baking for 90 seconds way down on the floor of that oven? See all that smoke rising up and venting way at the top?
 
The pizza is not in that smoke, much less for the length of time required to make it smoky tasting. That special joy of smoky taste is reserved for briskets and butts and baby backs cooked low and slow in a thick cloud of the smoke you choose.
 
 
I’ve baked pizza in an oven that’s about 500 years old.
 
You know what that tasted like?
 
Pizza.
 
Specifically, it tasted like Neapolitan pizza because that’s the kind of dough that was going in and baking at 800 degrees for a minute and a half.
 
I did burn off a lot of the hair in my bangs. Thermodynamics! (Lesson: don’t lean too close to the open door.)
 
 
You know what was fantastic about that antique oven?
 
The simple fact that it was 500 years old.
 
Using it was baking with an historical artifact.
 
The idea of the ghosts in that room around that oven was fascinating.
 
But the ghosts of bakers past did not flavor the pizza. Their traditions may have informed it. But the flavor was brought by the great Chef Joss Roper of Domaine de Cromey who made the dough from good water, fresh yeast, sea salt, and high-quality flour. 
 
 
In other words, the flavor came from the things that have taste.
 
It did not come from the scant, baked-in and polymerized oils on the ancient stones.
 
Nor from anything else beyond the skills of that chef. (Or me, when I wasn’t busy setting my hair on fire.)
 
There’s a lot of science involved in oven thermodynamics. I have no proficiency in that branch of physics—or any other, for that matter.
 
In fact, I barely passed a 100-level astronomy class in college. (It was taught by the head of the department who apparently saw “100” and mentally added a zero. The course description never said, “How’s your differential calculus?” If it had, I would’ve fled.)
 
 
I can work only with the practical end of things physics-related, like when is “fire good” and “fire bad”?
 
But I appreciate that there are smart people out there who have done the work and can put the lie to the self-appointed experts who fuel mythologies of a demon haunted world where wood fire is magic and New York-style pizza is impossible to replicate without New York-style water.
 
SIDEBAR: In case you’re interested, even the simple science of double-blind testing reveals pizza truths. The great J. Kenji Lopez-Alt at Serious Eats did a double-blind test for New York water in making pizza. You can find it here.
 
He demonstrated that in a group of chefs and food experts, nobody could tell the difference between pizzas made with either New York tap water or various bottled waters. The subjects most preferred the pizzas that were crispiest—a result that flew in the face of the myth, “New York water good, other water bad!”
 
 
I mention all this mythology because there’s a high degree of unfounded oven envy out there.
 
People just know if they can obtain the perfect oven, they will create the perfect pizza.
 
I used to own a perfect oven. It cost $7,000 and weighed over half a ton.
 
That oven allowed me to make some stunning pizza.
 
That oven was also a pain in the ass.
 
Living with that half-ton dome was the reason I became so interested in the potential of the standard home oven.
 
Who has the time, the resources or the patience to perfect wood-fired pizza when they also have  a career, a family, a dog, a cat, a budget, a barbecue grill, and a big-screen TV and need to stream the hilarious limited series Chef’s Table: Pizza, the first three seasons of The Bear, and the first 55 seasons of the Food Network's Chopped?
 
 
Yes, people sat around my dinner table and thrilled to the pizza I had made.
 
One guy, a real estate developer, even wanted to open a pizzeria with me.
 
And I admit, that oven could be transformative and the pizzas astounding—especially when that oven went past 900 degrees. It’s like seeing the deity of your choice in your kitchen. (Flames as clichéd religious metaphor notwithstanding.)
 
Those pizza parties happened maybe four or five times a year at most. That’s because it’s a project that begins with lighting and tending a fire for three hours.
 
That’s long before company arrives and anyone uncorks the wine.
 
There’s a lot of wood involved, a lot of flame, and a lot of ash. Occasional burnt hair. 
 
When we were having a pizza party, I would begin working on it at 3pm.
 
With friction like that, you can see how the simplicity and convenience of using a standard home oven might hold some appeal.
 
 
When I wanted to whip up a pizza on the spur of the moment, my standard home oven was there. Harnessing its low-friction simplicity for pizza became really attractive.
 
In fact, I learned to enjoy making pizza in that oven so much that I decided to write a book about it.
 
I knew people who had bought cruel, tiny, hard-to-use ovens—which they never mastered and were now languishing in the garage, covered in dust.
 
I wanted my friends to know that owning a special oven was unnecessary—and that in many cases, a home oven equipped with a baking steel was preferable. (And cheaper.)
 
I also feel somewhat vindicated. The suitability chart in Modernist Pizza calls the home oven an acceptable compromise oven for making the kinds of pizza I prefer to make—which is often the same kind of pizza made in the unnamed city way back at the beginning of this rant.
 
That’s not to say I don’t miss the wood-fired epiphany pizzas on the mountaintop. I do. (Our house was at 8,000 feet elevation. No pizza up there besides mine.)
 
 
Making your own pizza is a thrilling combination of patience and practice.
 
It is not well served by merely chasing the elusive butterfly of oven magic.
 
Ovens are not flavor.
 
Ovens are not success.
 
Ovens do not make a pizza for you.
 
Ovens are tools.
 
When you know what to do with a particular oven, you can make magic happen. Now that I live at a mere 23-feet above sea level with a simple consumer oven, I’ve made far more pizzas for far more people in two years than I made in 12 years with the wood-fired behemoth.
 
Some of those people have said things like, “I wake up thinking about your pizza,” “You’ve ruined me for any other pizza,” and “I feel like I’m back in New Jersey!” (You may not realize it, but that last one is flattering beyond reason.)
 
 
In the right hands, an oven can be transformative.
 
In your hands, a home oven can be transformative.
 
And the oven you already have can make magic happen—if you let it.
 
Magic is something you bring to the party.
 
The real magic is not in the oven, but in clear-eyed practice and patience. And be ready: spend enough time practicing the art of transformation via pizza, and people will be amazed and even transformed themselves.
 
So will you.
 
No special stones required.
 
Just the stones you were born with.

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