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Comment by mpcovcd | Hacker News Reader

For anyone reading this and interested in making their own pizzas, pizzamaking.com is an amazing resource for making pizza at home. Great pizza is all about the temperature it cooks at, and most home ovens can't reach the needed temp of 600F+ for NY style and 900F+ for Neapolitan style pizza. The Blackstone pizza oven is highly recommended, and for for less than $300, it reaches temps of 800F+ and churns out amazing pizzas at home in less than 5 mins of cooking time.

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You don't necessarily need an oven, a pizza stone works to make a Neapolitan style pizza. You have to heat it for an hour at max temperature. After that, the pizza will be done within 3-4 minutes and have the same consistency as from a high temperature oven.

Are you sure it takes an hour for the stone to reach temperature? You need the entire thing to be as hot as the oven can make it, but does that really take that long? Heating it any longer doesn't make a difference other than increase your electricity bill.

It seems to take that long. I only did it for 30 min in the beginning and the last pizzas turned out much better than the first. Since I had it in for an hour I get consistent results from the start. The stone is quite heavy so I can imagine that it takes a bit to have the whole stone on temperature.

But could obviously work faster with a good oven, mine came with the flat.

Interesting, thanks for your measurement points! I rarely make pizza at home so I don't have a stone but I've been meaning to get one. Since they (hopefully) have high thermal conductivity it should be fairly easy to measure with an IR thermometer.

While extra high temperatures and/or fancy ovens will certainly make a better pizza, it's not a requirement for making great pizza at home, even when using raw pizza dough (store bought or home made) and throwing it yourself.

The better your crust, the better the pizza, but heck, even using pre-made Boboli pizza crust can yield a good tasting home-made pizza.

Although, I'd certainly recommend getting some dough from your local grocery store and throwing it yourself... it's a skill that's surprisingly satisfying to learn and to get good at, plus it makes the entire experience a ton more fun and enjoyable (and it'll impress guests as well)!

Pizza is very easy to make, and can be a lot of fun!

Some of the other flatbreads/Naan breads available in many supermarkets work well also. I tend do thin/crispy crusts anyway so these plus a pizza stone work pretty well for me. Working with pizza dough was always the "step too far" for making my own pizza but now I find it's pretty straightforward.

> Some of the other flatbreads/Naan breads available in many supermarkets work well also

Naan breads are great for "personal sized" pizzas, especially the garlic Naan breads!

I'd also say you can mitigate some of the temperature differential by making sure you have a pre-heated surface in the oven. An upturned (perforated or not) baking sheet in an as-hot-as-it-can-go oven for an hour or so makes a decently hot base for the crust.

You can also make a great pizza in a cast iron skillet. It will hold a lot more heat than a baking sheet and gets your dough pretty crispy.

> An upturned (perforated or not) baking sheet in an as-hot-as-it-can-go

Or a pizza stone if you have one (they're fairly inexpensive usually).

But a pizza stone is a single-tasker kitchen gadget (thanks Alton), where-as the baking sheet is a multi-tasker with more utility.

Both will do wonders for getting a more crispy crust!

Pizza stones aren't just for cooking pizzas on. They help you maintain your oven temperature[1].

Also, IIRC, Alton Brown does use a pizza stone, but he recommends buying unglazed ceramic floor tiles as an alternative.

[1]https://www.cookingforgeeks.com/blog/posts/the-two-things-yo...

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