Dan Richer
Appearances
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
So the oven has always been a challenge. It's kind of a round peg, square hole type thing. The home oven is highly inefficient. It doesn't hold heat very well, which makes it safer for your kitchen.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
home ovens don't bake hotter than 550 degrees if you're lucky and pizza ovens hover anywhere between five six hundred degrees for new york style pizza much higher for neapolitan style pizza so if you're trying to make neapolitan style pizza in a home oven you're gonna run into some challenges because There's just not the temperatures that you would require.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
But the home oven is very good at staying in that 450, 475, 500 degree range. So making a pan pizza is fantastic. really the best use for your home oven without having to massively compromise.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
Yeah, so I love that. Lately, I've just been using the pizza steel in my oven. It just lives in my oven, stays there, makes it a little bit more efficient. If you want to add more thermal mass or a material to heat up and stay hot. And fire bricks are great. You can line one of your oven racks with fire bricks and then put a piece of steel on top of it or not.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
Home ovens are not very well insulated. So every time you open the door, you're losing much of the heat. And pizza cooks from the... top down, but also from the bottom up. To get a crispy crust, you need thermal mass. You need something that can get hot and stay hot even after you open the oven door.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
Not even remotely.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
I've just had so many bad experiences doing that, and it never works. There's not enough thermal mass in a cookie sheet that is very thin. And cookie sheets, listen, they make great cookies, right? They don't require the level of heat that a pizza does. A pizza steel or a pizza stone should be enough to bake one pizza.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
If you're trying to bake successive rounds of pizza, which is what we do at my house, right? I have a wife and two kids and we each take turns making a pizza. So my son will make a pizza. We bake it. We all eat it together. Takes about 15 minutes for us to scarf down a pizza.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
To eat it and make the next one. The point is we want to give the oven time to regenerate its heat in the baking steel or stone.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
Yes, it is very important. People are chronically under preheating their oven.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
minimum of 45 minutes.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
The best thing to do is turn your oven on when you take your dough out of the refrigerator.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
So I'm turning the oven on well in advance. I use the broiler in a couple of different ways. Sometimes I'll use it in between bakes to reheat the pizza stone. So we take a pizza out. I know I need to close the oven and get that stone hot again. I'll flip on the broiler and that gives that pizza stone a blast of heat.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
Let's say you're the bottom of your pizza or the undercarriage has baked at a faster rate than the cheese has melted. throw it under the broiler, finish up the top. If you can afford to have two pizza stones or two pizza steels, that's always best. It increases the amount of thermal mass that you have and it increases your options.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
Baking pizza is kind of this game of strategy where you know what your end product should be. How you get there, who cares how you get there? So having two pizza stones or pizza steels on two different racks gives you options. So you can start it on the top stone.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
And if you notice that the cheese is melting faster than the undercarriage is baking, move it to the other pizza steel that still is fully preheated from your hour-long preheat. That's smart. Every time you you attempt to make pizza, you are you have the opportunity to learn something about the flour, about your oven, about.
Things Bakers Know: The King Arthur Baking Podcast
A Deep Dive Into Pizza, featuring Dan Richer
needing about anything so you have to bake with your eyes wide open and constantly be thinking about it and and yeah it gets addictive because like for me when i attempt something i want to do great i want to succeed at what whatever i am interested in and with pizza the the more attempts you make the better you get at it