The Secret to Perfect Homemade Pizza

This week on Bon Appétit's Project Recipe we tested a Three-Cheese Pizza with Pancetta and Mushrooms. It got me thinking: What's the difference between good homemade pizza and great homemade pizza? Well, there are a few major players, including cheese proportion, yeast variety, and a good pizza sauce recipe (all of which I detail in my Project Recipe blog). But what really makes the difference is heat—the cooking surface for the pizza. (This is why "brick oven" or "wood-fired" pizza spots have cult followings.) There is a great way to replicate this flavor at home (short of building a pizza oven in your backyard): Buy a pizza stone.

My pizza (left) came pretty close to Giada De Laurentiis's (right) from the May 2007 Bon Appétit

If you make homemade pizza with any regularity you should have a pizza stone, which is nothing more than a big slab of fire clay that sits in the bottom of your oven. Once the heat is cranked to the maximum and the stone is heated through (it takes at least a half an hour and frequently more) you've got the perfect surface to turn out a crackling-crisp, perfectly browned crust. It's also great for baking convincingly rustic loaves of bread. My stone is 14" x 16" and about 7/8" thick; I think I bought it at Bed, Bath & Beyond 15 years ago. Thicker is better, but they can be heavy. Avoid the circular ones, which are less forgiving of substandard dough shaping skills (like mine).

When you're buying the stone—faced with shelves of pizza accessories at the kitchen supply store—you may find yourself wondering: "Do I also need a pizza peel?" A pizza peel is that long-handled shovel-like thing used to move pizzas in and out of the oven, and I've never owned one. In fact, using one at home strikes me as slightly gratuitous, like wearing a chef's toque while you cook. I could see the point if you were working with a real pizza oven, which is short, deep, and very, very hot (above 700 degrees); you need that extra reach and leverage. But with a standard household oven you can just use a flat metal baking sheet, which works just fine, and is still useful when not called for pizza duty. The trick here is to use parchment paper. Find out why on Project Recipe.

 More on bonappetit.com:
 Italian Recipes Slideshow
 Quick Weeknight Recipes
 The BA Food Encyclopedia: Tips, Tools, and Ingredients

Comments

[chrish]

I use a cake-lifter similar to this one rather than a pizza peel or baking sheet - it's got a long-enough handle and is very thin.

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[grailknight]

Fortunately for me, after thirty-five years after first worked in the Great South St. Louis Pizza Wars of the '70s, I have very good dough rolling skills and can get away with a round stone. and I use a peel. My pies are so good, that my wife doesn't want any other pizza, even though I like to go out and find the best pies out there so I can mimic the best qualities.
The best sauce is crushed and pureed tomatoes with kosher salt.