Pizzerias

Colloquially called “pizza parlors” or “pizza joints,” pizzerias are restaurants that have high-temperature ovens specially designed and constructed to bake pizza. The type of oven significantly influences the pizzeria’s products and, consequently, helps define the restaurant.

Some pizzerias have wood-burning hearth ovens that can attain temperatures of 850°F. These ovens must be manned by skilled pizza makers who by training and experience know how to form a pizza by hand, how to use a pizza peel (a large, long-handled wood or metal paddle) to load the oven, when to rotate the pizza in the oven for even baking, and when to remove the pizza from the oven. An experienced pizza maker can produce up to one hundred pizzas per hour in a single wood-burning hearth oven. Because of the high temperature of the oven, a thin-crust pizza placed on the preheated hearth cooks quickly. The crust of the pizza will be very dark and crisp from the high heat of the hearth and it may have a distinctive wood-smoke taste.