Pizza Physics: Why Brick Ovens Bake the Perfect Italian-Style Pie | Hacker News Reader

Pizza Physics: Why Brick Ovens Bake the Perfect Italian-Style Pie

npr.org

106 pointspseudolus82 comments

The guy quoted, Kenji, contributes to Serious Eats and is active on reddit and twitter. He's done a lot of work on comparing different flours, comparing different pizza ovens, and also has good recipes. If you're a pizza buff, it's well worth your time checking out his work.

I've made his hacker free pizza [0] which turns out decent. The hard truth, though, is that you're never going to get the chewy, moist flavor from a classic oven. It just doesn't get hot enough.

There's a lot of new companies coming out that mimic the brick ovens. I've personally bought a RoccBox (per Kenji's review) and the pizzas come out great [1]. It's able to push to 800F. Currently I use his recipe [2] for the dough and want to get more practice nailing down hand kneading, presentation, etc. Once I've mastered that, I want to start experimenting with different ratios and then eventually move on to figuring out sour dough cultures.

[0] - http://dopeboy.github.io/pizza-first-attempt

[1] - http://dopeboy.github.io/roccbox-pizza/

[2] - https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2012/07/basic-neapolitan...

I read your blog articles then read more articles on your site. I'm impressed with your writing style and you've inspired to write up some of my own experiences. Thank you very much for sharing.

this is fantastic, thank you for the great writing & information! I was curious, is there a reason you go for KA over caputo? I migrated from KA -> Caputo after getting into the recipes from https://www.amazon.com/Flour-Water-Salt-Yeast-Fundamentals/d..., I perceived a positive difference, but it was anything but a blind experiment :D.

This is on my list of things to test. I've done 00 in the past but I wasn't capturing my notes from those runs. I've recently gone with KABF because it's easier to acquire and Jeff Varasano claims "...you can buy any bread flour available at your local supermarket and you'll be ok." [0].

Interestingly, Jeff uses a blend of 00 and KABF which may be another experiment to run.

[0] - http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm

The RoccBox has interested me before, but I can't seem to connect the "you need higher temperatures for Neapolitan pizzas" claim with RoccBox's "[t]o achieve an authentic Neapolitan pizza, a 90 second cook in a stone floored, 500°C pizza oven is required. RoccBox is just that."

You're saying it goes much higher than 500 degrees, though? Their site seems to say 500 degrees is its limit, but maybe they mean the stone floor itself.

800°F is 427°C.

That will teach me to ponder these things before my morning coffee! Thanks for pointing out that it's Celsius.

So, this doesn't work by itself in most setups (it won't heat the top and the bottom of the pizza at the same time), but I've seen a really cool trick used: a plate of silicon carbide in a microwave oven absorbs microwaves and turns them into heat (just like food, but it can withstand much higher temperatures). This can reach extremely high temperatures (IIRC, 800C+), hot enough to smelt tin.

When doing this, watch out for the impedance of the silicon carbide at microwave frequencies.

Too low, and microwaves reflect off it, going back into the magnetron, causing it to overheat and die.

Too high, and microwaves pass through it, reflect off the far wall of the microwave back into the magnetron, causing it to overheat and die.

Either do this in a microwave that has overheat protection (generally the ones which don't say in massive letters on the manual "DO NOT RUN EMPTY"), or put a glass of water in with any 'experiments'.

Article mentions the method that I’ve found to be very good for home use:

  1. Baking steel in oven preheated to 500° for around an hour
  2. 5-6 minutes of baking
  3. Flip to broiler for 1-2 minutes

Being frustrated with burned top, and undercooked bottom I figured out that using the broiler together with a couple 2-3 mm thick pre-heated aluminium sheet that I placed the pizza on produced pretty good results. Not that I was aiming for a particular style of pizza though, ymmv.

The sheet itself was placed on an ordinary oven rack somewhere below the middle of the oven.

It seems to align somewhat with their findings. Since the aluminium sheet is only heated by the air, the bottom doesn't get burned, but the slight extra boost of initial heat cooks the bottom about right compared to the top. At least for a bit thicker pizzas as the one I made.

You probably would want maybe an even thicker plate to get a really short cooking times, like the 2min in the article. In any case, you will have to wait for a little bit between each pizza for the plate to reach the appropriate temperature.

Just buy a pizza steel (like this: https://pizzasteel.com/). Warm it in an oven at max for 45 minutes, then turn the grill (broiler) on for 15 mins to get it as hot as possible.

Then bake your pizza on it with the grill still on.

Or make your own using a slab of stainless like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldo56hGAzHA I can recommend Alex's channel for the more hacking/DIY minded chefs.

+1 I love Alex’s channel. Highly entertaining!

I just went to a part of the city (southern SF) with lots of workshops. Found a steel piece that I liked, and bought it. The whole 50lb chunk of steel cost me ~$50; it's sold by weight.

Then I soaked it in vinegar for a day, and all the rust/grime wiped right off.

Then I coated it with oil and put it in the oven at 500 to season it.

There are also circular shaped baking sheets which are designed for pizza. Does a great job but preheating is key. https://www.amazon.com/Wilton-Recipe-Right-Pizza-2-Piece/dp/...

19 minutes, 180 degrees C, with some steam. of course not pizzeria level or anything professional but they are so much better than before because of the extra moisture.

The self cleaning cycle on an electric oven is close to 1000 degrees, and can be used to cook pizza:

http://staff.washington.edu/freitz/pizza/clean_cycle_pizza.h...

But keep in mind that many people have tried and still failed to adequately disable the locking mechanism on a self-cleaning oven, and had to watch (and smell) as their pizza turned to a big pile of ash.

That almost happened to my mother who accidentally set the oven to clean with lamb chops in there. My father went into the basement, turned the gas off and somehow unlocked the oven door. Lamb chops were saved.

You'd think that they'D try a test run...

I now really want to try this but I'm scared of causing a fire. :D

“I bought more/cleaner/flatter bricks, including 1 granite tile ($5.50) and 2 slate tiles ($1.60 ea) to try in lieu of expensive ($20-40) pizza stones.”

Oh no, that granite is going to—

“granite cracked after 1st use. slates were still ok.”

Yup. Still, solid results for a home oven setup.

About a decade ago I read a hack where you place a large ceramic pot saucer (the thing that goes under a potted plant) on the top rack as high as it will go, and using a well seasoned pizza stone on the bottom rack as far down as it will go.

You then either turn on the broiler for an hour or if you can disable the cleaning cycle lock turn it on the cleaning cycle.

I found that this actually worked, but was really hard to make work without the long spatulas they use in commercial kitchens. It's also super easy to burn yourself and your food because it's at the wrong height. It will also heat your home up to a massive degree such that you need to let your entire kitchen cool off for hours.

Not worth the trouble in my estimation.

Because they had brick ovens, and things that cooked well in brick ovens "survived" as something to cook in a brick oven, while things that didn't, didn't.

Another option is to use a Kamado grill with a pizza stone. They can get very hot, and with the charcoal it gives it a nice smokey flavor. You can add wood chunks for extra flavoring as well. It's hard to eat pizza from the oven now after we have starting cooking them this way!

A far cheaper, easier to use and easier to clean option is an Uuni oven.

This is what I do as well, and the results are amazing. Another benefit is that with the right dough and temperature, the pizza bakes in two minutes or less.

I have a Big Green Egg (kamado-style grill) with 1" thick ceramic wall, which might be a comparable thermo substitute for the brick. Reaching 600° F is no problem.

Because it's wood (or charcoal) fired, so you get the flavor from the wood.

And with a BGE pizza stone, you get indirect heat on the bottom of the pie.

Whole setup works great. I used it recently to reheat half-baked (lol) pizzas from Berkeley's Cheese Board Pizza Collective (aka, our communist pizza). Very tasty.

We've been chasing awesome home pizza for almost 2 decades. Pizza stones, steel, convection oven etc. Last year, I built an Alan Scott style brick oven using [1] this book. It naturally does what we were trying to workaround with lots of hacks.

I can confirm that it is really hard to make "wood fire" style pizza in a home oven.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Bread-Builders-Hearth-Loaves-Masonry

So the whole thing can be reduced to the fact that the brick supporting the pizza transfers heat to the crust slower than steel. This allows the crust to cook at an even pace with the water rich toppings.

It sounds like if you want brick oven pizza you don't need the entire baking chamber to be constructed of brick. You simply need a brick platform on which to place the pizza. The brick needs to be heated to temperature first though.

I use a pizza stone but I also turn on the convection feature of the oven. The oven is set to 230C/450F middle or sometimes the top rack.

I bake pizzas on a ceramic baking stone and I'm very satisfied with the results. Before baking a pizza I preheat the oven with the stone in it to the max level. Pizza is baked after 8-9 minutes in the oven.

My ratio for the pizza dough is 265 ml (gr) of water, 400 gr of flour. That would be two pies 33 cm in diameter.

Simply get a small outdoor clay oven, those work fine and are not that expensive anymore.

Assuming you have an “outdoors”. When living in an apartment this isn’t possible.

Check out uuni pizza ovens. They use wood pellets for fuel and in 10 minutes of pre-heat mine gets to the necessary temp to cook a pizza in a minute or so. Small enough to put on table on a balcony or fire escape and you can even pack it in a carrying bag and take it on the road.

Check with your local laws...that is probably illegal.

No different than any place that allows you to have a grill at a similar location, and since there are never going to be flare-ups or similar issues it is actually safer than those items; for CA residents you need a concrete or stucco balcony, no wood. I use mine in my English garden (back yard) but it is portable enough for lots of different locations.

Uunis will absolutely flare up. That's the whole reason they tell you to not stand near the back of it when in use.

Hasn't happened to me in the past two years of use, but I guess YMMV.

Starting a fire on a fire escape sounds like it should be a prohibited activity.

It probably is, was just trying to think of the equivalent for a place like NYC where apartment balconies are less common than they are in CA. OTOH I am pretty sure I have seen a small weber or two on fire escapes on occasion.

Although, thinking about it, a fire escape should be the least likely part of a building to catch fire.

Thanks for the suggestion. How do you like the uuni pizza oven? Also, does using the wood pellets get you a smoky taste to it?

I like mine a lot and it was a lot easier to move to a new place then the fire-brick oven I had planned for several years ago. It limits pizza size to about 14 inches but since they cook insanely fast it is easy to do personal pizzas for everyone instead of bigger pizzas to be shared. No real smoky taste at all, the wood pellets are a short step up from compressed cardboard and seem to provide nothing besides heat.

Downside is that it only does pizzas. No chance to do pizzas one night and then use residual heat for bread the next day, etc. If you have the means and space I highly recommend a real clay/brick beehive oven, but once you do pizza in a high heat oven you are never going to go back to trying to crank up the temp in a conventional kitchen oven.

Or a Big Green Egg or similar Kamado-style cooker. I've been making pizza on my BGE all summer, and it is fantastic. Cook for 2.5-3min at 600f, rotate 180 degrees, and cook another 2.5-3min.

Kamado cookers make great ovens, smokers, and grills.

I've had pizza cooked in an outdoor clay cob oven once. It was probably the best pizza i've ever had. This was years ago and I still don't think i've had any that's compared since. It was just the perfect level of crispy and soft. I've got no room to have one where I live...but they do definitely produce a fine pizza.

The paper this is based on had a big discussion a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17437229

This isn’t unique to pizza. A French bread bakery also uses a brick oven, and that oven takes days to break in and requires periodic brick replacement.

French bread is made using a special oven with a steam injection at the start of the bake.

My own bread-making improved a lot once I started getting steam into the oven at the start of the bake - initially via a misting-spray, and later via a container of water.

Two pizza/physics related stories on the front page of HN in about two months. Impressed

I suppose that sufficiently fine-grained temperature control would also do it.

Is it only Americans that call a pizza 'pie'?

As an Australian it sounds wrong, very wrong - a pie has dished sides and filling, not just topping.

There is a style of pizza native to America which has dished sides and filling.

Which deviates so far from pizza, it ought just be called Chicago pie.

Hehe, I’m going to chuckle if we get a “Deep Dish isn’t pizza” fight going on HN.

There are a few other non-Chicago “pies” or Deep Dish styles as well. https://slice.seriouseats.com/2008/01/a-list-of-regional-piz...

It’s a delicious casserole.

Yes, it is. In the rest of the world it's called a pizza because that's what it is.

Also pie is made of pastry, pizza is made of bread dough. I thought the title was a mistake or something.

I would qualify that by saying that only in some areas of the US is a pizza called a pie. I never heard that term until I was an adult. I would say it's probably limited to the northeast and perhaps Chicago.

Lifelong Chicagoan, we never use the word pie. That's a New York / east coast thing.

pizza means pie in italian

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pizza

As an Italian, I've never heard anyone use "pizza" as a synonym for pie, which is "torta".

Uhoh, I always thought torta was a sandwich. That is what I order from a local Mexican restaurant... The joy of overloaded words.

Can't say I've ever bothered to look up pizza in a dictionary before, but here we are.

dictionary.com has this to say about the word pizza: a flat, open-faced baked pie of Italian origin, consisting of a thin layer of bread dough topped with spiced tomato sauce and cheese, often garnished with anchovies, sausage slices, mushrooms, etc.

And the dictionary that comes with MacOS claims the origin of the word pizza is Italian, litterally 'pie'.

<shrug>

Neither do I, or anyone I know of. Pizza meant "pie" originally, at least until 1700, but that meaning has long gone. If the american translation is old enough it did have a point

A pizza is an open faced sandwich.

A pie is a close-sided sandwich.

Pumpkin pie isn’t closed, at least, not from my experience.

New Yawker here: It's mainly a NY thing (and probably throughout the northeast) used to describe a whole pizza vs individual slices. Though it's rare to hear someone use the phrase "pizza pie" as it gets shortened to "pie". When I order pizza I always ask "gimme a pie to go" and I get a whole pizza.

You know I love what your city did with pizza. I love how much it has influenced pizza around the world.

However I'm getting tired of seeing NY-style pizza shops opening up here in central Ohio. Some chain that focuses on NY-style relocated their headquarters here (from previously being in NY!).

We've already got our own style (central Ohio, wider Ohio region as far as I know). I don't want poor imitations of NY style taking over.

Sure Sbarro’s are starting to pop up more but that’s largely just because they want to compete with the other chains. The only one of those doing an Ohio style pizza being Donatos.

Decent NY style pizza can be found here as well though. Sarefino’s at North Market does a pretty good job. There’s not any risk to Ohio style pizza as far as I can tell though, the overwhelming majority of independent pizza places still serve this almost exclusively.

"the overwhelming majority of independent pizza places still serve this almost exclusively"

The old neighborhood independent ones, sure. But newer developments (that aren't just catering to campus) are seemingly all NY-style.

To be honest I'm probably less annoyed with having the option than I am with that we have our own stuff, so let's celebrate that instead of copying NY and LA and being a purely derivative culture.

If I want NY-style pizza, I'm going to NY. Anything else is a poor imitation.

What’s Ohio style

I'm from the US - we always refer to pizza as, well, pizza. Pie is something that is usually (but not always) sweet. The closest reference I have from childhood is a song talking about "pizza pie".

Apparently the US does not have meat pies, or at least they are not ubiquitous like here in Australia.

you are correct :)

I mean, there are a few, and likely more that are local in areas. I think they used to be more popular: For example, I found a salmon meringue pie recipe in an old pie cookbook my grandmother had. But alas, most folks will think more of cherry or apple than meaty goodness.

The site just redirects me to their GDPA choice page. After clicking the option to not sell my soul I land on their plain text site (which itself isn’t bad, it loads amazingly fast), but only to the startupage instead of the article. That’s just a list of articles, that one not included, and no option to search. Well fuck it

Here you go:

https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=630544154

Someone needs to write an extension for this. The id number is on the URL so it's a trivial script. Activating Firefox's reader view makes text-only NPR articles not only fast but look great too.

Thank you!

> The ideal Italian pizza, be it Neapolitan or Roman, has a crisp crust flecked with dark spots

That might be true of Naples, but definitely not Rome. The perfect Roman pizza is rectangular focaccia style.

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