…and I really like it. It makes a damn fine thin crust pizza. The thing wasn’t cheap ($75) but I really enjoy making pizza at home, and once I got it seasoned and figured out how to use it, it works fantastic.
I have had a pizza stone for years, and this thing puts it to shame.
One of these?
I got one for Christmas. They do, indeed, put the old clay pizza stone to shame. I love the thing. Plus, I’m working on upper-body strength getting it into and out of the oven!
That looks pretty nice. I never used one of those, but for years I’ve been happy with the cast iron pizza pans. Heat up much faster and work just as well or better than stone. The steel looks a bit more convenient for sliding things in and out with a peel, because it’s flat.
Everything in making crisp, well-cooked pizza is in warming up the oven sufficiently. Most stones and steels insist on an hour warmup… which leads me to suspect that a plain old cookie sheet would do almost as well, given that much warmup time. The purpose of the stones/steels/platters seems to be to force you to remember to wait long enough.
The thing with the thicker surfaces is they retain heat much better and they spread it more evenly. You need efficient heat transfer to get the proper “spring” in a fresh baked pizza. You can see one guy’s round up of different surfaces and how they perform. The plain ol’ aluminum pan did not fare well.
There’s also an interesting comparison of baking steel vs cast iron here. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.
ETA: And now I have. Look at the comparison between the 1/4 inch, 1/2 inch steel and cast iron. The 1/2 inch steel pan is in a league of its own. I’m surprised at the poor results they have there from the cast iron, as I get much better charring on mine and the test I linked to above shows better charring, but who knows.
Just leave it in the oven. Top or bottom shelf. It never really gets in the way.
The size is key too. There are few things more frustrating than creating a beautiful pizza on the peel, only to have 1/4 of it fall off the stone. Keep the sucker clean and you will get years of service from it.
Yeah, it does, unfortunately. I do leave it in the oven a lot, but on occasion, I need to move the racks around, or I need to actually use that bottom rack and I don’t want to risk something burning because of the extra heat from the steel.
I also think it gets in the way of air movement, but most of the time, I don’t care that much.
Overall, I just tell myself I’m working on my pitifully weak upper body strength.
You guys are getting ripped off.
Not in the fact that baking steels work, but that you can go somewhere like discountsteel.com, and order a slab of A36 hot rolled steel in the same size (16x14x0.25) and shipped to you, all for the price of slightly over $60.
It may not be quite so spiffy, and it may take a little bit of cleaning, but it’s a lot cheaper!
$15 is a lot cheaper? Piffle! That’s one delivered pizza.
Just for the fact that the thing comes ready-to-go, and more importantly, FOOD SAFE, I think it’s worth it. Call me crazy but I prefer my pizza without machine oil.
All this being said, $75 is a lot of money for a hunk of steel. But after having a couple wonderful pizza parties, where friends get to make their own, I believe it’s worth every penny.
That’s $60 shipped- they’re about $35 prior to shipping. For $80 prior to shipping, I could probably get a 3/4" thick plate, or get one in stainless if I wanted to.
You don’t think the spiffy one isn’t the exact same thing, only prettied up, do you? They just clean them up for you- plate steel is pretty much plate steel.
I’m planning on calling up their Ft. Worth location and going and picking one up, and cleaning/washing it with detergent and a wire brush, and then seasoning it like I’d season a cast iron skillet.
Pizza is one of those foods for which quality ingredients are so expensive and specialized it’s better to find a good 'za shop and buy it from them. Not to mention the cost of heating your oven to 400 for an hour and a half, and the amount of prep time it all takes.
I rarely diss home cooking or the intent behind it. But like rotisserie chicken, pizza is just one of those things best left to a specialty preparer. IMVVHO YMMV AATS…
The $80 includes shipping.
I shopped around a year or two ago for a pizza steel, before the place in the link started making them, and the prices I found were all around $70-$80, not including shipping.
Nah, making pizza at home is fun and deeply satisfying once you get the hang of it and can do it as you like it. There are certain pizzas I’ll only get take out, certain pizzas I can only get by making at home (Detroit style), and certain pizzas I just prefer making myself. They’re fun and pretty cheap to make–the most expensive ingredient is usually the cheese. Then again, I’m one who likes baking bread, smoking meat, curing bacon, and stuff like that, so pizza is but a blip on the prep time scale. You want a pain in the ass? Making homemade pierogi or, better yet, tiny little Turkish mantı (both types of stuffed pasta). Those are labor intensive and a true labor of love. Pizza is pretty easy, once you get the hang of it.
Except for the dough, I highly disagree if you are already a good home cook.
We can sauce for pasta, and it double purposes for pizza. The toppings are nothing more than standard ingredients found around our house, or easily available during a regular grocery run.
We buy the dough from our local pizza shop (they simply do a better job than I can, and it’s always available. If I make my own, I have to plan 24-48 hrs in advance). Granted, I have my own outdoor wood fired pizza oven , but even cooking it in the house it’s not always about the pizza. For us it’s about the experience, and spending a few extra minutes with our little one (or the SO, or both). And we can all have exactly the pizza we want. My 8yo can have cheese only, I can have the Carnivore/heart-attack special, and Mrs. Butler can have a garden on hers.
If it’s only about the pizza, a call into the same shop that sells us the dough also works.
I’m going to have to agree with **pulykamell **and butler1850 - making a pizza at home is cheap, easy, and can easily be better/as good as a professional pizza place.
And I gotta call you out on the rotisserie chicken thing as well. Really? Rotisserie chicken?!? I can roast a chicken in my oven that’s 10x better than any rotisserie chicken I’ve ever had and take a nap while it cooks. Incredibly easy and delicious. Maybe they’re better where you are, but every rotisserie chicken I’ve ever had is overly salty & way overcooked.
Gotta jump in on the “the hell you say” side. We make better pizza than any place within reasonable drive or delivery area, and uber-cheap, too. We use the grill, though, instead of a stone or steel. Dough, oil, crushed tomatoes, fresh basil, fresh moz and dinner is served! Total cost: maybe $5/pizza, and most of that is for the cheese.
Yeah, I was going to comment on the rotisserie chicken, but then lost interest in making the point. But, I agree. I don’t have a rotisserie, but instead do the high heat method of roasting chicken, and I’m more happy with what I get using that method than buying the $5.99 rotisserie chickens at my grocery. I don’t save any money–it’s about break even for me with store-bought rotisserie vs. home roasting, but I get a better product roasting myself, as it hasn’t been sitting around for hours under a heat lamp, and I can season it exactly as I like it.
shrug I guess everyone has their limits in the kitchen. We have fifty pizza places within about five miles and between the cost of materials, time to prepare and only middling appetite for 'za these days, I’d rather pay a pro $15 and be done eating by the time $20 in materials and power and two hours have been used up to the same end. (Not to mention the per-use cost of a fairly expensive kitchen item to get an acceptable result.)
Roasted chicken: ditto. A fresh bird of decent size costs more than a store-roasted one, and while the process is pretty simple, it’s such an unbelievable greasy mess I’ll put up with a pretty good store chicken over some perfected home one given the cost and mess issues. I also hate handling raw poultry - it’s like carrying around a zombie head.
EMMV. Nuf sed.
That’s cool. We all have things we don’t like to make and pay for the convenience (and I mentioned a couple above.) But if you’re spending $20 to make homemade pizza, you are buying some real primo ingredients. A typical pepperoni or sausage pizza shouldn’t cost you more than about $7-8 to bake, including heating costs. Keep it plain or just make it with stuff from your garden, and it’s practically free. Cheese is your biggest cost.