[PICS] Cooking Pizza with A36 steel sheet
- Thread starter Reggs
- Start date
I dunno what type of steel mine is. It's 1/4" thick and made in Canada, marketed as a pizza steel specifically. Nothing fancy I'm sure.
I season and maintain my griddle steel, but I find the pizza steel doesn't need that kind of treatment. Once was enough. I don't wash it or use abrasives on it so the seasoning should last a long time. Haven't had a pizza stick to it
Reggs
Veteran XX
Yes, there was too much oil on. In retrospect I should have put a coat on, then lightly wiped away excess. That would have seasoned it, but I'm happy to have the hole in the new one. Everyone eats pizza into old age and this baking steel will outlive me and I will likely use the steel when I'm elderly too.
This pic shows the 2nd seasoning attempt layer that has chipped away easily. Below there is no rust, meaning the 1st seasoning attempt actually worked. If I stopped then it would have been fine.
I will also add, so many articles/videos about what to use to season. I've heard flax seed oil flakes too. When I go to antique stores there is cast iron cookware that has no cookware and never had any fancy internet induced seasoning. If I ever season anything again I'm going to use bacon grease because it's easy to work with and would never flake like an oil.
Seasoning aside, I'm glad to have the new one just because of the hole. It would have been ever better if it was 2 plates you push together for the same surface area. It would have been easier to store.
Two biggest milestones in my pizza progression were going from shitty aluminum sheet pan pizza to a steel, and going from making dough same day to doing 48hr cold fermentation.
The latter makes a huge difference in flavor and texture.
That's some nice char. I'm going to make the dough tonight and will make pizza in 2 days or later. When I was fooling around with cast iron pan pizza I cooked with 7 day old dough and it was good.
Capers are good on pizza and I prefer them over black olives. I've read that if you get dried mushroom, then hydrate them, those are the best for pizza instead of fresh cut too. I plan to try a lot. I'm using bread flour now, but eventually want to try whole wheat flour because it's more healthy, and fancy high gluten flour just for pizza.
Reggs, why did you go with steel instead of brick?
well they aren't bricks like you build a house with...they are usually referred to as fire bricks or refractory bricks.
From what i understand you can techincally use the same bricks you build a house with because they are fired at like 1200 degrees or something like that, so they technically can go that high, but fire bricks can handle up to like 2000 degrees and fire bricks are made to get hot fast and release heat fast.
I see them used a lot as kiln lining too
From what i understand you can techincally use the same bricks you build a house with because they are fired at like 1200 degrees or something like that, so they technically can go that high, but fire bricks can handle up to like 2000 degrees and fire bricks are made to get hot fast and release heat fast.
I see them used a lot as kiln lining too
The wood-fired ones i've seen here are like above. brick lined all around with a wood fire going right inside. They have a unique taste but and i can't say i've had a bad one, but the setup looks like it would cook unevenly. Seems very popular for outside ovens in residential homes too, but they dont make 'big' pizzas usually. The pizzas are generally smaller
You use steel because it's compact and dense. Low density firebricks do the opposite of what you want a pizza steel (or stone) to do - hold heat.
The ovens you pictured run at way higher temps than a home oven. The bricks are insulating the structure of the oven (and surrounding air) from the immense heat.
The ovens you pictured run at way higher temps than a home oven. The bricks are insulating the structure of the oven (and surrounding air) from the immense heat.
