The Complete Handbook of Pizza Makers & Ovens

Chapter 1: Understanding Pizza Makers & Ovens

The Real World of Pizza Ovens: Heat, Dough, and Time

When you get right down to it, a pizza maker or oven is nothing more than a controlled volume of heat. The physics is absolute. The oven is a box that contains an energy source, a material that absorbs and releases that energy, and a surface on which the pizza cooks. The difference between a $200 countertop unit and a $20,000 brick oven is not fundamentally one of magic, but one of thermal mass, heat flux, and control. To understand these machines, you must first abandon the idea that they all do the same job in the same way. A countertop convection oven uses forced air to strip heat from the surface of the dough, while a wood-fired oven uses radiant heat and a thick, hot floor to bake the dough from the bottom up, simultaneously setting the crust and applying intense heat from the top. These are two different engineering solutions to the same problem, but they produce fundamentally different pieces of food. The choice of machine is a choice of physics, not a choice of brand.

Let's start with the three primary ways heat is transferred to a pizza: conduction, convection, and radiation. In a pizza oven, conduction is the direct transfer of heat from a hot surface (the deck or stone) to the dough that sits on it. This is what drives the bottom crust's development. A very hot stone,