reggs I'll give you a serious post with some serious advice
you overseasoned that and it needs to be redone, but you can easily redo it and it shouldn't take more than a day
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.