Baking Steel

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am, by no means, a pizza expert.  I enjoy good pizza but I also don’t turn my nose up at mediocre pizza.

This year for Christmas, dad got us a baking steel.  This began as a kickstarter project, touted as “better-than-a-pizza-oven.”  It was started by Andris Lagsdin after he read the Modernist Cuisine, where author Nathan Myhrvold mentioned that steel would be a better cooking surface for pizza crust – as compared to the stone bricks used in a pizza oven.  The steel is more conductive and results in a more even crust (all from the baking steel website).

Sidenote: Modernist Cuisine is a super expensive set of books all about the science of food and it has AMAZING photography, but it’s really really expensive – more expensive than any textbook I ever bought in college.

So we decided to give it a try.

I found a thin crust recipe by the folks at America’s Test Kitchen.  They recommend using a food processor, but I’m too lazy to pull that out for something that was sure to be super sticky.  I used the dough hook on my mixer instead.  I’m not going to say this crust was amazing.  In fact, I’d probably choose the $1 Betty Crocker mix instead – I mean, it’s $1.  But that’s just me.  Feel free to give it a try and see what you think.

We made a few different kinds including:

• Hamburger + roasted potatoes + rosemary
• Ricotta + garlic + artichokes + tomatoes + basil
• Pepperoni + hamburger + cheese + basil

Every tried a potato on a pizza?  It’s maybe the best thing ever.  I mean, it’s a carb on a carb.  🙂

I had a pizza stone before getting the baking steel, and I definitely think the steel is an improvement.  We had some pizzas that came out better than others, but I’m going to attribute that to user error – at least for now.  The pizzas nice and crispy, and the tops were golden with deliciously bubbly cheese.  We drizzled a little olive oil on the crust, post bake, and finished with some flaked salt (yeah, we fancy).  All in all, it was delicious and definitely better than Costco pizza 🙂