I had been making pizza at home for years, and have had pretty good success and been satisfied with the pizza. New York City has plenty of good pizza places, but a lot of times it is good ot make your own. Especially in Upper West Side where good pizza options can be surprisingly limited. I also find my own pizza is thinner and does not have that 3,000 calorie per pizza bog down of salt, grease, big crust to weigh you down.

Emile Henry Pizza Stone

To improve my pizza crust I first purchased a Emile Henry Pizza Stone at Williams Sonoma. The pizza stone definitely improved crust quality somewhat, but not enough to be competitive with better pizza places in New York, while using a home oven. Getting the pizza right, not using the high heat of a real pizza oven is the challenge, and the stone, while an improvement over nothing, was not really enough of an improvement.

• The pros
  • Not super expensive – $50
• The cons
  • Only somewhat better than using nothing
  • Requires the oven to be heated longer than using nothing

Breville Pizzaiolo Pizza Oven

In the interest of taking the next step, I took a look at the Breville Pizza Oven, also at Williams Sonoma. Looked pretty good, a bit expensive, and something I do not really have counter space for in Manhattan. In researching the Breville Oven through pizza forums the commentary in general was

The Pros

• The oven is really good and makes great pizza in 2 minutes
• You can make one pizza after another quickly – no real down time in between pizzas. (As opposed to other products where you need to reheat, and get rid of corn meal in an effort not to set off the smoke detector!)

The Cons

• Expensive – Between $1,000 at Williams Sonoma
• Takes up a lot of space, especially in a Manhattan apartment

Given the cost of the unit, and pizza forum reviews that suggested that a Baking Steel www.bakingsteel.com I decided to give the baking steel a try before purchasing the Breville Oven.

Baking Steel

I ordered the Baking Steel Pro Package – includes the ½ baking steel and a pizza peel. The original baking steel is ¼, and according to reviews produces comparable quality pizza. Consistent with the pizza forum reviews, the baking steel produced significantly higher quality thin crust pizzas than the Emile Pizza Stone. The pizza also cooked much faster, more in the 5 minute range as opposed to 10 minutes for the stone.

• The pros
  • Pizza is great
  • Not super expensive
• The cons
  • A bit heavy
  • To clean corn meal off to avoid smoke issues I need to let the steel cool, so it is a little more difficult to crank out pizzas. Also given the heat and weight, hard to take out of oven quickly to brush off. In a suburban space with an outside grill these issues do not exist.

Next order of business is to improve dough quality by using the Baking Steel Dough Recipe Still a work in process, but to this point, the Baking Steel www.bakingsteel.com is my preferred solution