Equipment Review: Pizza and Baking Stones and Steels
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The blazing-hot oven of a real pizzeria can produce pizza with flavorful, crisp, deeply browned crust; melty, bubbling cheese; and hot, savory-sweet tomato …
Would love to know which pizza crust recipe was used for this testing video. ATK has published many and I really like the bubbles shown from this recipe.
Thanks – any time I want/need a piece of kitchen gear I ALWAYS check out the ATK reviews so that I choose the best.
Pampered Chef by far has the best pizza stones and stoneware!!!
this review suck, you have to do it again. I'll eat the results. Let's get to it ladies!
How about blackening the steel like you can do with cast iron? I triple blackened my cast iron and it's amazing.
Hi America's Test Kitchen, How do the steels tested here compare to the large (typically 14”-15”) cast iron pizza pans from Lodge and others? 🙂
I love the ATK smash burger recipe but I always end up with a kitchen full of smoke. Tonight I threw my baking steel on my Weber kettle and used it as a flattop. I let it heat over a full chimney of coals for half an hour and then hit it with spray cooking oil. I cooked them using the timing in the recipe and there was an absolute kiiller crust on those burgers. I won’t do them any other way now. I think my steel may be getting more use as flattop going forward.
What you really want to do is go to a place that sells marble countertops. It will almost always have a scrap bin outside. Or go in and ask if they can spare some scrap pieces. Get enough to completely cover the oven rack. And if you can, especially if you have a two-level oven, cover the sides as well. The extra heat retention helps for pizzas and for baking bread. Costs nothing except the time and gives better results.
I've been using a 16 x 14 inch – 3/8 inch thick pizza steel for the last 8 months. It weights 24 pounds. I get great results with it. My pizzas have never cooked so fast with the right amount of leoparding (dark brown spots) underneath the crust that gives the pizzas that wonderful wood oven flavor. You don't really need to buy a brand name pizza steel that you may end up paying a lot more for; carbon steel is carbon steel. Mine is a generic pizza steel made out of A36 carbon steel that is laser cut with rounded corners. I did however smooth out all the edges with a hand file so it wouldn't have the slightest leftover sharp edge that could potentially scratch the chrome plating of the oven grill on which it rests. I bought my pizza steel on ebay for $35 plus shipping from a seller (synergysteeldesings) located in Pennsylvania..
The important specs to consider are the size you can accomodate inside your oven and the thickness. You should have at least one to two inches all around from the edges of the pizza steel to the oven walls so that the heat can properly circulate. A thicker steel will have higher thermal capacity, i.e. it will accumulate more heat, so after you bake one pizza, if you want to bake a second pizza, it will be have more heat reverves left to transfer it to the second pizza or third and so on. However, thicker steels will obviously weight more and take more time to heat up. A 1/2 inch thick steel for my pizza steel size weights in af 30 pounds, something to consider if you have to move it around a lot. I just leave mine inside the oven all the time, one third high up from the bottom of the oven. I heat it up for one hour like Lisa said, sometimes even longer. With regards to material safety, carbon steel, an alloy tipically consisting of about 97% iron and 1% carbon, is safe, arguably the safest and most bio-compatible metal with our body's phisiology
Under these conditions and running my oven full blast at 550°F in convection mode, I bake Neapolitan style pizzas in 4 minutes. You will need a pizza peel to launch the pizza onto the pizza steel and to take it out of the oven once baked. Spread plenty of the finest grit hard durum semolina you can find onto your work surface before you stretch the pizza dough so that you can easily pick-up the pizza pie with the peel from the work surface and so that it can slide off with ease from the peel onto the pizza steel. A steel blade spatula at around 4 inches wide is also needed to scrape off some toppings that will inevitably fall onto the steel at one time or another. You will also likely have some semolina residue left on the steel that burns out and turns black once the pizza is removed. Simply use the spatula to run it off onto the empty peel placed underneath the pizza steel. That's a great advantage of pizza steels though, you can scrapre off things from them without fear of cracking them as opposed to pizza stones, they're virtually indestructable.
Some words of precaution, specially if using the convection mode of your oven and run it at the highest heat setting like I do. Work from the sides of the oven so that you don't get a full blast of very hot air coming at your face when you open the oven door. Wear oven mittens if in between baking pizzas and if the oven is still running and you have to scrape off toppings or semolina that have fallen onto the pizza steel, otherwise you hands will cook like your pizzas but as an unwanted extra topping. If your oven doesn't automatically cut off the convection airflow when you open the door – my previous oven worked like that – turn off the convection mode to remove the residues and turn it back on when finished so it's ready for the following pizza.
What changes did you do to make the steel version better this time? Also, would adding a pan of water help prevent the dryer effect using the ceramic?
The most useful 6-minute cooking video ever — thank you!
Preheating a stone for 1 hour….for 8 minutes worth of cooking?
Also: If you're looking for a cheaper option, you can get this:
https://www.amazon.com/14-16-Handle-A36-Rounded/dp/B08YNRHC17
Then soak it in vinegar overnight to remove the mill scale, then season it like a cast iron or carbon steel piece. Much lower price for those who aren't afraid to put a few minutes of work into their tools. And if you're just not super thrilled with clicking a link in the comments (I don't have anything to do with them, so maybe it goes dead? No clue)… Just search for A36 steel and look for the dimensions you're looking for. ".25" is 1/4 inch, which is what the default steel is. .375 is 3/8. But you might also see 1/4"x14"x16" (or something similar). In this case "A36" is the type of steel. Then you're just finding something that fits in your oven. Make sure you do the vinegar soak overnight though to get rid of the mill scale. If you've never done it, just do a search for "vinegar mill scale" and watch what they do. You'll probably want to do the final part outside, so as to not cause a mess.
Remember folks: No reason to pay huge amounts of extra cash for someone to give you a product that's essentially the same with just a couple minutes of work extra.
I always just put the stone or steel on the top rack, right below the broiler on high, with the oven door open a bit. No need to wait an hour, you can have the stone up to temp in 10 minutes. Likewise, if you were to put the oven on to 500 or 550 and leave the door open a bit, with the steel or stone on the bottom rack, you'd find it would get up to temp MUCH faster than an hour. Again, probably 10-15 minutes.
I bought the Nerd Chef steel a little while back and i love it!
Rust….Seasoning constantly burns off at pizza temps. Want even better pizza? Buy an Ooni Koda.
Been using a glazed ceramic tile ($1.00) from home depot for years. Many (most) do not contain lead and are made at temps exceeding 500F. I leave it in the oven when self-cleaning and comes out like new.
Because my oven only reaches 500F, to get a head start on browning, I put the dough with sauce in first for a few minutes (your time will vary) and then remove and put on cheese/ toppings and then back in until done.
"Daltile does not intentionally add lead in any form as an ingredient to either the body materials or the glazes of our manufactured products…"
Quarry Tiles? Hello, been using them for 30yrs, they are cheap like $1/ea now (mine were like 0.69), you can get them cut for free to fit your oven however you like. And there is NO cleaning needed. Cheap enough to have two racks going at once. And if they crack, you don't give a crap, because you bought a few extra.
Maybe instead of being negative, I just should unsubscribe. I mean there is only so many times over the many years you can read/watch the latest version of the "Best Oven Roasted Chicken Ever".
How do the steels tested here compare to the large (typically 14”-15”) cast iron pizza pans from Lodge and others?
ProTip: For a great non-stick surface, use Flax seed oil to season your baking steel.
My old pizza stone JUST broke! Perfect timing for buying a replacement.
That's interesting and those baking steels could probably be used on a gas cooktop as a frying surface for pancakes and the like.
I have a four-tile stone set, and I love it. So easy to transport and store, I'll gladly throw them in a bag to bring to a friend's house, and it takes up much less space in a cabinet or on a shelf.
I use large lodge cast iron round and it works fantastic. You should include that in your testing.
Can the steel be used on a kettle charcoal grill to make pizza and as a flattop griddle for smash burgers?
That difference in texture between using ceramic or steel is interesting. Could the fact that ceramic is porous be allowing more moisture loss from the crust too?
Would have liked to see them include a soapstone option. I use soapstone box in the oven and bbq and it turns out great pizza.
#WWLD
Why should anybody pay for one of these steels instead of just buying literally any piece of steel in the right dimensions?
Protip: find your local steel fabrication joint, have them carve you up a 1/4" slab of mild steel to fit your oven. Or, better yet, have your friendly French Canadian uncle mill one out for ya: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNAr7adtpdY
If you put the steel on the top rack and use the broiler, perfect pizza in 6-7 minutes. Boom. Don’t even have to worry about the cheese not melting or crust being overdone. Made the best pizza of my life last night with that method.
Anyone who pays $30 for pizza stones is nuts. It's an unglazed tile! 4 6X6 unglazed tiles will cost you maybe, maybe, $10.
Why would anyone buy something marketed as "for cooking" at 3x the price over the exact same product without the marketing markup?
Glad to see this. Have not heard of the Steel until a couple of days ago – been checking into them. Thanks for the input, ATK – and thank you to everyone commenting.
I used to make pizza at pizza moto in NYC back when it was truck operation only. I currently use the baking steel griddle. It’s a little thicker than the original. One side is like the original, and the other side has a smoother surface like like a flattop griddle. We use the griddle as much as or more than the baking side.
Like baking in a real wood fired oven, the first pie can get a burnt bottom. I use the broiler the whole time on the first pie, and it is the fastest pie out of the oven. I usually do my kids cheese pie first. Like in a wood fired oven, you want to put your next pie on the same spot. It’s a cool spot because of the previous pie, so you can have a little more wiggle room with it. Generally the second pies and after, I broil for a minute or two and then turn the oven back to 550.
Baking bread has been a learning curve. For a hearth bread, I preheat the steel for an hour at 350. The. The last 10 minutes before baking I’ll bring it up to 425, the temp the recipe calls for. Otherwise, the bottom of your bread will be black. I’ve even tried sliding a baking sheet under the bread about 10 minutes to insulate the bottom. It still burnt.
I love the baking steel griddle and I love making pies that look almost as good as a wood fired oven. Hope the advice helps.