Equipment & Cooking Environments

Pizza in a domestic oven

The oven most people already own tops out roughly 200 °C below a Neapolitan oven, which rules out one specific style and rules in almost every other — the whole craft is in choosing the right style and getting the surface hot enough.

Using the grill or broiler for pizza

The overhead element is the free fix for the one problem a pizza steel creates — a base that is done while the cheese is still pale.

Cooking on a pizza stone

A slab of cordierite or ceramic that stores oven heat and gives it back to the base. More forgiving than a steel and easier to overheat than people expect, its real enemy is thermal shock rather than temperature.

Cooking on a pizza steel

A solid steel plate that transfers stored heat into dough several times faster than stone. It is the strongest single upgrade for domestic-oven pizza, and it creates a new problem — a base that finishes before the top.

Pizza on a baking tray

The surface everyone already owns. Thin and low-mass, it cannot crisp a base the way a stone can — so the honest answer is to stop fighting it and make a style that is meant to be baked in a tray.

Pizza in a cast-iron pan

A cast-iron skillet is a small, very heavy baking surface with walls. Preheated and oiled, it fries the base as it bakes, which is the most reliable route to a genuinely crisp bottom without buying a steel.

Pizza on a BBQ

A covered BBQ is a genuinely capable pizza oven that most people already own and never think to use — it reaches temperatures a domestic oven cannot, and demands far more attention in return.

Pizza on a gas BBQ

The most controllable BBQ for pizza. Turning off the burner directly beneath the pizza converts the grill into a genuine indirect-heat oven, which solves the burnt-base problem before it starts.

Pizza on a charcoal BBQ

Hotter and more characterful than gas, and far harder to hold steady. A two-zone fire is not an optimisation here — without one, the base is charcoal before the cheese has melted.

Pizza in a kamado

A thick-walled ceramic cooker that holds heat like a masonry oven and, with a heat deflector fitted, is the closest a BBQ gets to a genuine pizza oven — and the fastest to incinerate a base without one.

Pizza in a wood-fired oven

The environment Neapolitan pizza was designed around: a 60–90 second bake under a radiating dome. It does one thing better than anything else and is genuinely bad at most others.

Pizza in a gas pizza oven

Most of a wood-fired oven's temperature with far less of its skill requirement. It gets to Neapolitan heat in 20 minutes rather than two hours, and burns bases just as readily if you ignore the floor.

Pizza in an electric pizza oven

A countertop oven with independently controlled top and bottom elements — the only high-heat option here that works indoors, and the only one where you can dial the top-to-bottom balance directly.

Peels and launching

Included here because a failed launch ruins a pizza that everything else got right, and because wood and metal peels solve genuinely different halves of the problem.