Pizza on a Baking Steel

I've been making pizza for a long time, usually on a pizza stone in the oven but when weather permits I'll sometimes pull out the 2Stone Pizza Grill and make some pies outside on my Weber Grill.  The char you can get baking at 800-1000 degrees adds a lot of flavor in my opinion, but it takes a LOT of extra effort and several days to pull off properly.  I have found a relatively nearby source for the '00" flour I like to use for Neapolitan pies (Caputo's Cheese Market) but on more than one occasion my well laid plans were thwarted by bad weather.  I had read in "Modernist Cuisine" about using a sheet of solid aluminum instead of a pizza stone but really didn't think too much about trying it until reading about a Kickstarter project for a new product called a Baking Steel on the Serious Eats website.  I must have dropped hints t the right people because lo and behold, a new Baking Steel was waiting for me under the tree on Christmas morn.

A Baking Steel is basically what it sounds like, a sheet of steel (14" x 16" x 1/4" thick) you put in the oven to bake your pizza on instead of a stone or pan.  Some of the advantages are a greater thermal mass and better heat transfer properties than a pizza stone.  I thought it would be easy for me to just have a piece of steel cut to the same dimensions, but the cost of materials and shipping would have made it about the same price and I would have had to pay extra to have the edges ground down to make it safe to pick up without leather gloves.  The Baking Steel seemed a better option.  A recipe for NY style pizza dough was included in the box so that's where we start.

The NY style Pizza Dough recipe included with the Baking Steel was originally posed on the Serious Eats website by J. Kenji López-Alt but is based on one from Peter Reinhart's Pizza Quest blog.  One thing I don't like about the recipe is that it's in ounces.  My scale has a 1 gram resolution, but when weighing in ounces the resolution is only 1/8 ounce (about 3.5 grams) so I can get inconsistent results when trying to measure small weights in ounces.  Here is the recipe, expressed in the original ounces, converted to grams and in baker's percentages for those so inclined.

22.5 oz     637.9 grams   100%   Bread Flour
0.5 oz       14.2 grams      2.2%   Sugar
0.35 oz     9.9 grams        1.6%   Salt
0.35 oz     9.9 grams        1.6%   Active Dry Yeast
1.125 oz   31.9 grams      5%      Extra Virgin Olive Oil
15 oz        425.2 grams    66.7% Water

The recipe calls for using a food processor to pulse the ingredients together for 15 minutes or until it comes together, then for an additional 15 seconds and finally finishing off by kneading by hand a little bit before splitting in to 3 parts, putting each ball in to a zip-top bag and in to the fridge for at least 1 and up to 5 days.  I prefer using a Kitchenaid mixer with a dough hook set to low for about 4-5 minutes, then scaling in to 375 gram balls and bagging for the fridge.

On pizza day I removed a dough ball from the fridge, rounded it on the counter and placed it under a bowl on a floured surface to warm up to room temperature (I gave it about 75 minutes).  For the bake I placed the pizza steel on the bottom shelf as the instructions...well...instructed and set the oven temperature to 550 degrees.  I let the steel preheat in the oven for about an hour while the dough rested.  When ready, I opened op the dough in to about a 12" pizza skin and placed it on a well floured wooden peel (I find wooden peels are best for loading the pies in to the oven).  I used a basic marinara sauce topped with some thinly sliced red onions, green peppers, kalamata olives, fresh purple and green basil and finally some slices of fresh mozzarella.  The pizza baked about 5 or 6 minutes before being removed from the oven using a metal peel (which I like to removal over the wooden one) and placed on the counter on a large brown paper bag.  After a few minutes of cooling a small drizzle of white truffle oil was added.  Here is the final result.

Everyone liked the final result!  I think the top of the pie didn't cook as fast as the crust so there are a few things I might try differently next time.  The easiest thing would be to place the steel on a higher rack in the oven which should increase the radiant heat hitting the top of the pizza. The other option would be to decrease the amount of sugar in the dough which would slow the browning.  I don't have a pic of the bottom of the crust but it was uniformly well browned.  Not the char you get at ultra high temperatures but much less work to get an awesome result!  I'm going to have a lot of fun with this!