Want to make great pizza at home? Feel the fire and learn to love your oven.

Oven mystique attracts novice pizzamakers like a candle flame attracts moths wearing little chef hats.

There are big, wood-fired Neapolitan-style ovens for "authentic wood-fired flavor." Little pellet-fired ovens “make a pizza in a minute!” Gas-fired outdoor ovens. Gas-grill oven inserts. Countertop electric ovens. Somebody just told me how excited he was to be replacing his standard electric range with a gas range for the improved pizza making potential. Really?
 
Pizza oven manufacturers often sell the romance of fuel, speed, ease, authenticity or convenience. Home pizza makers perceive all kinds of sexy options for pizza-oven nirvana. Here’s the unsexy reality about all this: At the very beginning, your homemade pizza success is not about buying another oven—it’s about understanding the oven you’ve bought, even if it’s the oven that came with your house.

​An example of oven confusion: more than one person with an expensive new oven sitting in the yard has asked me why they can’t get the pizza more crispy. The conversation goes like this:

“My pizza’s not crispy.”
 
“Are you baking pizza at 900 degrees?”
 
“Yeah.”
 
“Turn down the heat.”
 
“Down? But—pizza in a minute!”
 

It’s not a race. “Pizza in a minute” is a feature without a benefit.
 
If you’re an experienced pizzamaker, you’re probably going to infer that this “pizza in a minute!” oven will produce a convincing Neapolitan style pizza in about 60 seconds, which is a kind of an ideal standard.
 
Buying a specialized oven requires understanding what it’s specialized for.
 
One of my favorite over-romanced aspects of pizza ovens is fuel. Specifically: the taste of wood fire!
 
When it comes to pizza, wood fire doesn’t really have a taste. Yes, wood-fired pizzas usually have the taste of char—but that’s the result of flame.

What about the smoke, you ask? That’s vented out of the oven above the pizza. We're not making smoked bread. A pork butt that sits in a 220-degree smoke bath for several hours tastes of smoke. It’s different than a pizza sitting by an open flame for a few minutes. 


People also romance coal-fired ovens. (I’ve never seen a coal-fired consumer oven, but anything is possible.) What’s the romance of coal-fired pizza? Umm…
 
Coal heat is dry and can get very hot. The 900-degree coal-fired New Haven pizza is a legendary if virtually nonexistent pizza. (I believe there's about one such oven left in New Haven, but I might be wrong.) If a pizza pro knows what he’s doing, he can make a fantastic pizza in a coal-fired oven.
 
I’ve had a lot of coal-fired pizza that’s totally forgettable. It’s just OK. There’s no romance for the pizza whatsoever, and that's where it actually counts. Coal is just one more fuel for getting an oven hot enough to make a pizza. Coal fire is just a marketing decision and nobody in that pizza joint is romancing anything.

EDIT: Yes, it is possible to have a coal-fired oven at home. It's also a nightmare of permitting, insurance, equipment, labor and costs. You're looking at special coal storage requirements, industrial-grade ventilation, and hours of heating to reach temp. I read one story of a homeowner who jumped through all the hoops to have an outdoor coal oven--and got rid of it two years later. 
 

How romantic is an electric oven?
 
It’s not. But it’s readily available.
 
I make most of my own pizza in a standard electric home oven. Fuel doesn’t get much drier and unsexy than electricity.
 
I put a 3/8-inch baking steel in the top third of the oven. I bake at 550 degrees on the dial. (The steel gets hotter than that.) I also use the broiler to develop the char on top of the pizza.
 
It took me a little while to get to this pizza. Experimentation was involved.

 
The pizza tastes great. People love it.

ABOVE: Even more unsexy than steel: an upside-down cast-iron skillet in my home oven. I normally use a steel. But this was for an article on how to get started on the cheap. It works really well for a $23 thermal mass inside an existing electric oven. ​

ABOVE: A pizza baked in that electric oven with that upside-down skillet. The oven is not sexy. But that pizza makes me want to do things that are unnatural. (But legal, of course.)


I was recently using a friend’s brand new, gas-fired dome oven. He was frustrated because he couldn’t get the bottom of the pizza crispy enough.
 
I had my own dough with me, the same dough I use in my home oven. We made a cheese pizza.
 
We turned on the oven and let it reach 850 degrees. The flame was licking the inside top of the dome. The oven deck was about 650 degrees, which was how he'd been baking pizzas. We launched and baked a 14-inch pizza, turning as needed.

ABOVE: The cheese pizza that came out of my friend's dome. Looks great. Isn't quite satisfying. (But it's still pizza, which helps.) 


In about three minutes, we had a pretty good-looking cheese pizza. But it was floppy. The bottom wasn’t done enough. The taste was meh.
 
For the next pizza, we let the oven get back to 850, again with the deck about 650. Then…
 
Turned off the flame. Launched the pizza. Put the accessory door into the oven opening to retain the heat.
 
After about three minutes, we rotated the pizza and turned on the flame again. It was again rolling around the top of the oven, licking at the dome above the pizza.
 
It performed like the broiler in my home oven, baking the top of the and giving it a little char.
 
After about three more minutes and a couple more turns of the pizza, it had a crispier bottom and a more even bake. It tasted much more like something he had been hoping to produce.

 
In fact, he was a little excited. No tip sag!

ABOVE: One of the better, crispier pizzas to come out of the dome after learning to turn off the flame and close the door. (The toppings are mortadella and pistachoes, which I recommend trying. Unexpected and really tasty.)


Here’s the ironic challenge we were facing: the thermodynamics of a pizza dome oven differ significantly from the thermodynamics of a pizza deck oven.
 
An 850-degree dome oven is perfect for baking a Neapolitan-style pizza in about a minute to a minute and a half.
 
A 550-degree deck oven is perfect for baking a New York-style pizza in about 6 to 8 minutes.
 
In my little square box of a home oven, I’ve figured out tweaks to get my compromise of a home oven to behave more like a professional deck oven.

 
I can bake a convincing, crispy, New York-style pizza in about 6 to 8 minutes.
 
In the propane-fired dome oven, which is great for making a Neapolitan-style pizza, we’re figuring out tweaks to temper the bake to make it more like a New York-style pizza.
 
This doesn’t seem like it makes sense.
 
But when a guy says he wants a crunchy pizza with more structure, and the dome is the only oven he’s got, how else do you reverse engineer the process?
​
 
Pizza ovens are about thermodynamics, and ovens are not romantic. They’re not magic. Fuel is not magic. This process is not about getting the sexiest oven.
 
Somebody was just telling me about the magic of coal-fired pizza. I was thinking about that as I was looking at a Middleby coal-fired gas oven from around 1915. It’s a giant, wonky thing covered in white subway tiles stained brown and fitted out with a lot of black cast iron.

ABOVE: Chris DeLucia of DeLucia of Delucia's Brick Oven Pizza in Raritan, New Jersey. Dave Portnoy gave Mr. DeLucia's pizza a 9.4--one of the highest scores he's ever awarded. The oven is an antique, and it has a certain charm. But the magic is in the man. And he clearly loves his work. 


This coal oven is the size of a room and is cranking out hundreds of crunchy, charred pizzas a day for a family that’s using that oven since it was born.
 
The secret isn’t coal. The secret is knowing how to work with dough, sauce, cheese, and the idiosyncrasies of an oven fired by coal.
​
 
Ovens don’t make pizza. People make pizza. And like anything else, it’s an education and a skill—something that a lot of people actually do find sexy.
 
I’m pro-education. I'm also pro-context. Knowing what pizza you want to make and determine the best tool before plunking down the dough for an expensive pizza oven is huge. It can save you money, time and frustration and end up being the choice that truly enables sexy pizza making.


I know one very smart man who read my book and was asking for advice--related to making pizza in his expensive outdoor oven. My book is about making pizza in a standard home oven.

He must've become very frustrated because he went out and bought a pizza steel--and was floored. He made the exact pizza he'd been trying for months to make in his portable outdoor oven. He told me he was amazed and that he may never go back to the other oven. (I suggested he hold off on that decision.)


A woman once asked me, "What's your favorite pizza oven!"

I said, "My home oven."

She yelled, "I LOVE that!"

Me, too. 

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​A lot of big-time professional artisan pizza makers once made their first pizza in a home oven just like yours. You can do it, too. My weird little award-winning book is one way to make it so. The book is about how to get from zero to pizza using the oven you already have. Besides learning to make great pizza, there’s not much else you can do with it. In fact, you can’t even use it to level a table leg if you buy the Kindle edition (which is less expensive than the print editions and has links to instructional videos and printable kitchen worksheets). To learn more about Free The Pizza: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have, click here. ​