Inventor and guest writer Andris Lagsdin shares the story of how a realization at work led to Baking Steel pizza dough and one of the best pizza crusts you'll ever make.
A unique combination of interests and skills led to the birth of the Baking Steel. And, in my humble opinion, pizza is the better for it.
In my day job, I work for a family-owned manufacturing company, Stoughton Steel. But outside the office, I’m pretty passionate about food — pizza in particular.
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My thoughts are never far from creating the perfect crust. One day, I was browsing a volume from the book series Modernist Cuisine,
By Nathan Myhrvold. As fate would have it, Myhrvold stated that the best tool to use for making the perfect pizza crust would be a piece of steel.
And that, my friends, was my “AH-HA” moment! As soon as I could, I hustled out to our plant, found a piece of 1/4” high-quality steel, and brought it home for some testing.
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According to Myhrvold, steel is better at conducting heat than a brick oven’s stone. Because of that conductivity, pizza crust cooks faster and more evenly at a lower temperature, resulting in a beautiful, thin, crispy crust.
Here’s the scoop. We know from seventh-grade science class that steel is a great conductor. What I’ve since learned is that it stores more than 18 times the amount of energy — heat — than stone can store. The steel then transfers that heat so quickly that pizza can be fully baked in a home oven in about 5 minutes — less than half the time of a traditional pizza stone.
I’d spent plenty of time over the years with countless pans, pizza stones, gadgets, and gear trying to perfect my pizzas in a home oven. Who knew the solution had been waiting for me all along in a pile of steel over at the shop — and some insight from Modernist Cuisine? Talk about serendipity!
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I’m lucky to be living out my dream of combining two great interests — pizza and steel — into one amazing product, the Baking Steel.
Most artisan pizza dough rests 24 hours or less before you shape and bake it. But we’re going to make a simple adjustment to the typical no-knead recipe that will change your home pizza game forever.
Why is this extended rest important? The process, called slow fermentation, is a favorite of baking professionals and experienced pizza makers. By slowing down the dough’s rise, it has time to develop wonderfully rich, complex flavor.
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Do this test: Make a batch of dough, and divide it into seven pieces (as directed in the recipe below). Bake one crust after the initial 24-hour rest; then another at 48 hours, a third at 72 hours, etc. It’s a fun test and you’ll get to eat lots of pizza! The results should speak for themselves — you’ll notice a marked difference in flavor between the 24-hour crust and successive crusts.
By the way, don’t let the recipe name intimidate you. The hands-on time for this 72-hour dough is just 15 minutes — and that includes cleanup!
Knead the resulting dough for 2 to 3 minutes. The idea is to work the dough by hand until no dry patches remain. Knead until the dough forms a fairly tight ball.
Cooking Pizza On A Baking Steel
Let the dough rest and rise for 24 hours at room temperature. This process, called bulk fermentation, enables the dough to more than double in size and become very aromatic in a clean, alcohol sort of way. This 24-hour rest also yields wonderful flavor in your crust.
Working with one piece of dough at a time, fold two of its sides into the center. Rotate the dough 90 degrees and fold the sides into the center again. Repeat this process until you’ve formed a smooth ball. Place the ball, smooth side down, in your palm, and firmly pinch the bottom seam closed. If your hands feel too sticky at any time, dip your fingers in flour.
Place each piece of dough into a heavily oiled 1-pint lidded plastic container. Date the containers, and refrigerate for at least 48 hours. Each container of dough will make one 12” pizza crust.
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When you’re ready to begin your pizza, remove as many pieces of dough from the fridge as you need at least 1 hour before shaping. Any dough you don’t want to shape immediately can be frozen in its plastic container for up to 3 months, if desired.
Baker's tip: How long can you store your dough in the refrigerator? I find the dough has a “strike zone” for ideal use between days 3 and 5 (counting the day it’s made as day 1). After day 5, the dough will start to break down some, making it a little more difficult to stretch. But the flavor remains outstanding right through day 10. Dough that’s nine or 10 days old will be quite “brittle” and hard to shape, so use it for rolls, short bread sticks, or other breads that don’t require a lot of stretching.
Your first step is preheating your oven at 500°F for a good hour, with the Baking Steel on the top rack, about 7” from the broiler.
Baking Steel, Pizza Steel, Oven Steel, Oven Plate, Pizza Baking Steels
Stretch or roll your pizza dough into a 12” round, and place it on a pizza peel (or the back of a baking sheet, if you don’t have a peel).
After 2 minutes, rotate the pizza 180 degrees (front to back, back to front). Switch the oven back to bake mode, 500°F. Bake for 2 more minutes, until the crust is as dark as you like.
Want to bake your own professional-style pizza at home? Check out the Baking Steel; and try Andris' recipe above, or our recipe for Artisan No-Knead Pizza Crust.
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PJ Hamel grew up in New England, graduated from Brown University, and was an award-winning Maine journalist (favorite topics: sports and food) before joining King Arthur Flour in 1990. Hired to write the newly launched Baker’s Catalogue, PJ became the small but growing company’s sixth employee. ...
My Ooni has changed the way I make pizza — and bagels, focaccia, and even dinner With its high heat and compact size, this wood-fired oven is my summer staple.
Our new favorite pizza is this hyper-local, super-crispy style from the South Shore It's got a passionate following, lacy cheese edges, and a very special crust.In September 2008 I returned from Slow Food Nation convinced I would, by the end of the week, build a mud oven in the alleyway next to my apartment and, as a result, have wood-fired pizzas at my disposal from then on out.
Kenji's Ny Style Pizza Dough Cooked On A Baking Steel. Will Try To Go Thinner For Next Time, But Really Happy With This!
I had watched volunteers at SFN stomp in the mud and cobble together an oven in two days, and I couldn’t stop dreaming about the pizzas, thin and crisp with a blistered bubbly edge, that emerged from that wood-fired oven.
After doing a little research, I made a list of supplies and stuck it to my fridge. I even bought a book: How to Build Your Own Hearth Oven. It was going to happen. I would get my wood-fired oven.
But a few weeks passed, and I never got around to building it. And before I knew it, a few years passed. And then a few children appeared. And then a few dreams disappeared.
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Friends, guess what? It’s never going to happen. I am nev-er going to build that mud oven nor am I going to drop ten grand on a more professional wood-fired oven.
But guess what? It’s OK, because there is a product that will make all desires for acquiring these high-speed tools disappear. I had read about the Baking Steel in the
The story of the Baking Steel begins with Andris Lagsdin, a passionate cook, who, after reading about the conductive properties of steel in Nathan Myhyrvold’s
How To Use A Pizza Steel
Pleased to discover that what he had read proved true — that because “steel is a more conductive cooking surface than stone, ” pizza “cooks faster and more evenly at a lower temperature, resulting in a beautiful, thin, crispy crust” — Lagsdin initiated a Kickstarter campaign. And so was born the Baking Steel. Serious Eats’ Kenji Lopez-Alt, describes the tool as “the most impressive home pizza product [he’s] ever tested.”
About a year ago I discovered tipo 00 flour, which, when used in the Lahey pizza dough recipe, produced the best pizzas I had ever made. Learning to shape the rounds with a delicate hand, moreover, created great bubbles throughout the pie as well as that ballooned and blistered outer edge characteristic of Neopolitan pizzas. The Baking Steel takes these bubbles to another level. Kenji offers this explanation:
For the past month, I have been making some sort of pizza or flatbread nearly every day, and they have never tasted so good. A few pictures below capture the “oven spring” as well as the crispy, speckled “undercarriage, ” the two traits that separate Baking Steel pizzas from the sheetpan pizzas I have been making for years.
Pizza On A Baking Steel
There are other virtues to the steel as well — it’s lighter and more durable than stone; it doesn’t require a supply of wood — and again,
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