Bill,
Sorry to hear about your blue balls, lol. I read the article and had a chuckle. I too buy lots of flour from Wegmans, but I buy King Arthur bread flour…
Anyway, now that I know you’re a baker, I was wondering if you’d mind me asking you a baking related question?
I make pan fried pizzas. I was using 12×17 cold rolled steel pans, but have recently purchased a 13×8 Dura Kote pan from Lloyd Pans; it’s a great pan which doesn’t require any seasoning, etc. The problem I’m encountering right now is that I can’t have it on the bottom most rack like my old pans or the bottom crust burns. I’ve tried moving the pan to different racks during baking, but still haven’t figured out a solution. Should I (a) keep pan on bottom most rack and reduce temperature, (b) keep temperature the same and move pan to a higher rack, (c)??? This kind of seems like a stupid problem that should have an easy solution, but I haven’t been able to figure it out yet.
Bill’s reply:
Generally speaking, James, and I’m sure you know this, the problem with making great pizza at home is that you can’t get most home ovens hot enough. Most home ovens only go to 500 to maybe 550º F. Wood-stoked pizzeria ovens clock in at 600 to 700º F. I’ve heard some adventurous souls actually turn their home oven’s cleaning cycle on to ‘go to 11.’ So the point is, your problem isn’t the oven, unless you’re using a glass kiln, joyhole, or blast furnace.
It’s also correct that you’re baking your pie on the bottom-most rack. I’m not really sure why this is, except perhaps it helps to get more heat from the element.
So let’s turn our attention to what I suspect may be the cause of your pizza travails: the pan.
I cook my pies on a heavy ceramic pizza stone, about 3/4″ thick. I sprinkle a little corn meal on this to act as ball bearings to help slide off the finished pie. I’ve also in a pinch use a thin metal pan, but you do have to be careful not to burn the bottom crust on thin metal.
Ideally, with a home oven cranked up to 550º F, on a pizza stone, a thin-crust pie should take no more than 9 or 10 minutes to cook. The trick of course is to get the toppings to melt, roast, and pizzify before you burn the bottom crust.
You have to peak into the oven to make sure you’re not burning the bottom.
One trick I’ve read about, though I’ve not tried it myself, for thin-crust pizza — and it’s almost a sacrilege — is to cook the pie on a middle rack for the first 5 to seven minutes, then turn on the broiler above to brown the top. Let me know if this works for you.
The other variable in all this is deep-dish Chicago-style pizzas, which are a whole ‘nuther animal. Those pans traditionally can be very thick, even of cast iron. A deep-dish pizza is made upside down, of course, with the cheese piled first on to the VERY thick crust, followed by layers of other toppings with the sauce on top.
Deep dish pizzas, unlike thin-crust pizzas, are cooked in a moderate oven, say 350º F, for anywhere from 30 to even 60 minutes.
This lastly could suggest your problem, James. How thick are those pizzas you are burning?
The problem with cooking a thin-crust pizza for longer than 10 minutes is that it gets soggy. Remember that pizza supposedly evolved from pieces of burnt dough leftover and scraped from bread ovens in Italy. It should almost be burnt. In fact, I have a friend from Philadelphia who says we in central PA, and New York, and everywhere, don’t properly burn our pizzas like they do in Philly! To each his own.
