How to Trick Out Your Oven

Appears in
Pizza Czar: Recipes and Know-How from a World-Traveling Pizza Chef

By Anthony Falco

Published 2021

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The important thing is having thermal batteries (steels and/or stones) above and below. The key is to create a sandwich with the pizza in the middle. The battery on the top needs to be wider than the one on the bottom, allowing the heat to rise and get trapped between the two, creating a hot zone between them: an oven within an oven. You’ll get close to a high-temp pizza oven, maybe even a coal oven.

For my home setup I use a wide custom baking steel on the top oven rack and a 13-inch (33-cm) square baking steel on the bottom rack. Stones go on the bottom steel and the pizza goes directly on the stones. It gets hot.