Hello,
Welcome to Day 4 of Pizza School!
OK, Let's review one more time, to make excellent pizza at home, you should:
- Use a high-hydration pizza dough.
- Use four, good-quality ingredients.
- Handle the dough gently.
Here is one more tip:
Invest in a Baking Steel
The single best and most affordable step you can take to make better pizza at home is to invest in a Baking Steel.
In short, steel is a more conductive cooking surface than stone. This means heat transfers more quickly from steel to food than it does from stone to food. Why is this important for pizza? Serious Eats' Kenji J Lopez Alt offers this explanation:
"How does the baking surface affect hole structure? Well those crust holes develop when air and water vapor trapped inside the dough matrix suddenly expand upon heating in a phenomenon known as oven spring. The faster you can transfer energy to the dough, the bigger those glorious bubbles will be, and the airier and more delicate the crust."
I get the best results when I place my Baking Steel in the upper third of my oven, but every oven is different, so play around with placement till you find the sweet spot.
Oven spring:
This concludes Lesson #4. See you tomorrow, when I'll share the benefit of making your dough and refrigerating it a day or two before baking day.
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