The secret pro tip for great homemade pizza: unleashing the beast in your home oven...

​I pay attention to the pizza cooking questions over at the Troll Haven known as Quora. People occasionally ask about pizza, I answer, and maybe win a fan or sell a copy or two of Free The Pizza! But more important? I help prevent people from making pizza at home that's so bad they’ll quit before they’ve started.
 
If you’ve never heard of Quora, well, it’s a social site where people ask questions and impatient know-it-alls answer them with scorn and derision.
 
And then, there’s me. I hide my scorn and derision behind a smiling façade of self-serving servitude. (Oh, who am I kidding? I'm a total ham about this homemade pizza thing.)
 
Last week, a six-year old question popped up in my feed, and I thought, What the heck? I’ll answer it anyway. Somebody will see it.
 
Nope. Not just somebody.
 
Since I answered it five days ago, 17,000 people have seen it. Over 130 have upvoted it, and a couple dozen have commented.

The most surprising comments were things like this: “I just learned more about making a pizza in 2 minutes than I have in the previous 50 years. Thanks!”
 
That cracked me up. But it also pointed to an unspoken truth: a lot of people have no idea how and why pizza works.
 
And so many people thanked me and asked more questions that I thought my answer might be useful here on this fine Saturday Afternoon.
 
The original question I answered for the curious was this:

 
Why are commercial pizzas baked at high temperatures, but homemade pizzas are cooked at 375F? The same is true with steaks, which are cooked at 900F at Ruth's Chris but medium heat at home.
 
As much as I wanted to be a smartass about this (the non-sequitur “The same is true with steaks” is quite the opening), I decided to get off my high horse and be useful.
 
--Begin Quora Answer--
 
I’m It seems that this question is several years old. But it just came across my radar, probably because I run FreeThePizza.com, write pizza books, help regular folks make great pizza in a home oven, and answer questions like this a lot. So here goes…
 
My homemade pizza looks like this--partly because I NEVER bake them at a temperature as low as 375 degrees.

​You can’t get the oven spring, the crispy crust and the crunchy char with low temps. (BTW, the reason you see so much tomato there is this is a New Jersey-style tomato pie. The tomatoes go on top of the cheese, which is different from most other pizza styles.) [ED. NOTE: Angry reply to this comment follows below.]
 
ALL fresh pizzas should be baked at high temperatures. Whether they’re baked at home is irrelevant. Granted, most people don’t have a 900-degree wood-fired oven at home. But most home ovens at their hottest reach between 500F and 550F degrees. That’s plenty hot to bake a great pizza—if you understand what’s going on and you have the right tools.
 
A pizza baked at 375 degrees is going to be a disappointment. Even a pan pizza, which is typically baked at lower temps than a New York-style pizza, needs an oven hotter than 375. Even frozen pizza needs to bake at a higher temp than that.
 
The secret to great pizza is high heat and thermal mass. Put a baking stone or a baking steel in the oven and its mass holds the heat. You turn the oven up high, you heat the stone or steel, and your oven begins to behave more like a commercial pizza oven. That high-heat stone or steel makes the raw pizza dough pop up, makes the water evaporate quickly, and turns it all into a crispy crust.
 
It’s not possible make an authentic, high-heat Neapolitan pizza in a conventional home oven. The oven’s just not hot enough. That requires 800- to 900-degree heat. But commercial pizzerias making New York-style pizza typically run their ovens between 500 and 600 degrees, and they make great pizza if they know what they’re doing (or if they’re willing to do it). A home oven with stone or steel is an adequate compromise for making the same kind of great pizza—or better. If you’ve got a broiler in the top of the oven, that helps, too.
 
Ruth’s Chris is really not part of this conversation, and they don’t cook steaks at 900 degrees. They have ovens that will sear steak at 900 degrees, and then they continue cooking the steak at a much lower temp. You can do something similar at home by heating a cast-iron skillet to ripping hot, searing a steak on both sides for a couple of minutes, then roasting it the rest of the way by slipping the skillet into a 450-degree oven. But it’s a much different situation than pizza. Steak and pizza dough have very little in common. Except for…
 
Both steak and pizza benefit from the Maillard effect. That’s the browning that happens on the outside of the steak when it sears, and on the outside of the pizza crust when it bakes. Both the beef and the dough caramelize, and the chemical transformation that occurs is part of what makes both of them taste so good.
 
Anyway, hope that helps. Making great pizza (and great steaks) at home is a lot of fun. And when you learn how to do it well, you end up preferring to eat it at home. And pizza especially makes people really happy. If you want to know more about how to do it, look for the Free The Pizza book on Amazon. It’s a simple system for making great pizza whenever you want with the oven you already have. Good luck!

--End Quora Answer--
 
And there, my friend, is the answer to that question. I hope you found it at least entertaining if not useful.

 
One of my favorite, truly stupid comments (because the guy is a troll, not a pizza lover) was, “’New Jersey style’ pizza? Where in new jersey? Is this some north jersey bs? You dont put the sauce on top of the cheese!” (All the errors therein transcribed as written.)
 
I admit, I’m always a little annoyed by the unbridled audacity required to piss on someone else’s stuff. And I want to say something like, “And what have you created that makes people happy?” or “They’ve been doing it that way for 110 years. But why don’t you go there and tell them that? It should work out well for you.”
 
But trolls are a little like Fight Club. The first rule of trolls is don’t talk to trolls. Just don’t engage. So, I gave him nothing to latch onto: “In the Trenton area since 1912. Papa's Tomato Pies - Wikipedia.”
​
 
But if you’re a pizza geek, you might enjoy that link to Papa's. It’s a short read about one of the best pizzas I’ve ever had. It’s also very similar to Pepe’s in New Haven. And the commonality of those two pizzas is that they were made in the early 20th century by Neapolitan immigrants.
 
Is thin, crispy, well-charred pizza the true, original Neapolitan style? We’ll never know. But it’s fun to speculate that we here in the US may have some genuine, living pizza history…
 
If you’d like to see the kinds of things I’ve posted on Quora, check out my profile at https://www.quora.com/profile/Blaine-Parker-12

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Want to make pizza in a way that's full of best practices? You'll find all the simple steps to homemade pizza magic right inside my weird and award-winning pizzamaker’s manual, Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have. If you’re just beginning your pizza-making journey, this book is a convenient place to start because it doesn’t force you to make any decisions beyond making a pizza. It’s simply a step-by-step guide for getting from zero to pizza and amazing your friends and family. Learn more right here. ​ ​ ​
 
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