Baking pizza in a home oven

Pizza is very forgiving, and there’s a lot of shortcuts you can make. You don’t need a fancy Tipo 00 flour, San Marzano tomatoes or salt from some weird mountain in the alps. It will make a difference, sure, but not that big of a difference.

But the one thing that will have a huge impact on the pizza is a pizza steel. Not a pizza stone, a pizza steel. The pizza steel maintains heat much much better than a baking sheet or a pizza stone, making your crust all brown and crispy. If you want to level up your pizza game, I highly recommend investing in one, you can get a great one for $70 - $200. For more baking gear, checkout this guide.

The next important thing is preheating your oven. If you’re using a pizza stone or pizza steel you need to preheat it for at least 60 minutes at the highest temperature. That’s 1 hour. 60 minutes. 3600 seconds.

Do. Not. Skip. The. Preheat.

If you’re baking the pizza on a baking sheet preheating isn’t as important. Once the oven is at the highest temperature you can start baking the pizza.

So “real” pizza is supposed to be cooked in 90-180 seconds which means you have to have an extremely hot oven (more than 450°C/840°F), which means either a professional pizza oven or something like an Ooni. But I don’t, and probably not you either. My oven only goes to 275°C/525°F. This means we have to make some adjustments.

When cooking in a “professional” oven you can throw all the ingredients on the pizza; the tomato sauce, the cheese and the toppings and they will all be done within 180 seconds. But this isn’t the case with colder ovens like ours. If you add all the toppings on the pizza from the start the following will happen:

So the dough takes 420 seconds (give or take) to cook, but the cheese takes a lot less time. This means we need to first to just cook just the dough and the tomato sauce, and then add the cheese.

“But what about the toppings?”. So since we’re adding the toppings about halfway through the cooking some toppings might not be cooked properly in that time. So if you want to add mushrooms, pepperoni, salsiccia or similar things I’d suggest pre-cooking them and either add them with the cheese, or when the pizza is done.

The timings below are what works best for my 275°C/525°F oven. Your oven might need longer or shorter cooking time, so I’d suggest making a test pizza and note the times to make sure the pizza comes out great!