Best Pizza Stones and Baking Steels of 2025: Crispy Crust at Home
The difference between homemade pizza and pizzeria pizza is not the ingredients or the chef. It is the heat. Pizzerias use brick ovens that hit 800-900 degrees Fahrenheit, with a porous surface that pulls moisture from the dough and leaves char on the outside and chew on the inside. Your home oven maxes out around 500 degrees. A stone or steel makes up for that by soaking up heat during a 45-minute preheat, then dumping it into the dough the moment the pizza lands. A bare baking sheet cannot do this. You end up with leopard spotting, oven spring, and a crust that actually tastes like it came from an oven. ...