Making pizza at home is incredibly fun—but it can also be a challenging endeavor. If you’re a home pizza maker, the only thing standing between you and pizza greatness is your oven. Home ovens unfortunately aren’t optimized for making most styles of pizza. For example, if your intent is to bake Neapolitan pizza, you’re not going to get true Naples-style results in a home oven. It just doesn’t have enough juice to reach the super-high temperatures you need. There are some appliances that can do that and some small outdoor units that can get ripping hot; however, they might not be in everyone’s budget, especially if you’re just starting to make your own pizza. On top of that, safely transferring a prepped, unbaked pizza into a hot oven can be a harrowing exercise.

Don’t worry—you can make fantastic pizza at home, with your own oven. Keep reading to learn about the science of how pizza bakes and how you can get the most out of your home oven using a baking steel.

Understanding Your Oven

Baking a pizza is all about the transfer of heat energy from the oven to the dough, causing a delicious transformation. The water in the dough turns into steam, expanding bubbles created by yeast fermentation, resulting in that sought-after “oven spring.” Meanwhile, proteins in the dough unravel and create a stretchy web inside the crust, while starch on the surface turns into a crisp “starch glass,” giving you that satisfying crunch in your pizza crust.

Not every oven is good for every type of pizza. The pizza deck oven is the most versatile and is recommended for all our styles except Neapolitan. Thin-crust and medium-crust pizzas, like Neapolitan or New York–style, rely heavily on infrared light for baking. Traditional wood-burning ovens are masters of this technique, with their high, asymmetric heat. Ovens that are not specifically designed to bake pizzas can present some challenges to the pizza maker. Most home ovens use air temperature as their primary heat source, which can create a challenge for the home pizza maker.

Pizza ovens have a hearth floor that gets extremely hot and retains a substantial amount of heat when it is preheated. So when you put a pizza on it, there’s significant heat transfer from conduction. In a traditional pizza oven, the ambient temperature of the air is vastly higher and air makes much less of a contribution (see Modernist Pizza, vol. 1, page 354).

By contrast, home ovens work by heating the air within the oven. Because home ovens operate at temperatures that are hundreds of degrees colder than a pizza oven, heat transfer from the air is important. If a home oven has convection heat, the oven has a fan that blows the heat around the oven. This speeds up the cooking time, but it can set the pizza crust too quickly and contribute to a reduction in volume. When you load the pizza into a home oven and close the door, the oven will take some time to recover. Combi and convection ovens will take less time to do so since the circulating hot air makes the oven come up to temperature faster than in a still oven.

Additionally, a home oven doesn’t have a floor like a pizza oven, and the thin metal walls don’t help the situation because they don’t hold enough heat. We tried using a baking stone to mimic the hearth of a pizza oven. The problem is that the stone in a pizza oven is much thicker and gets much hotter, so even though the material is the same, using a baking stone isn’t that great at improving the performance of a non–pizza oven.

Here’s where a baking steel comes in. It can seriously transform your oven’s performance. Providing a direct heat source to the bottom of the pizza and getting the oven as hot as possible are two of the most important factors to improving your home oven—regardless of pizza style. Thin-crust and medium-crust pizzas need the high heat for their crust development, but even pan-baked pizzas benefit from the heat in order to achieve a crispy bottom crust.

How to Use Your Baking Steel to Maximize Your Oven’s Performance

The best way to try to replicate the floor of a pizza oven in a non–pizza oven is to preheat your oven with a baking steel or baking stone for 10–20 minutes (home ovens benefit from a 30-minute preheat). For most pizza styles, we recommend you place the steel on a shelf 10 cm / 4 in from the broiler in combi, convection, or still electric or gas ovens. (Be sure to check the individual recipes for specific recommendations.)

For home ovens, you can preheat the oven 15°C / 25°F higher than the recipe’s baking temperature calls for, if your oven allows it. This is so the temperature drop from opening the oven door isn’t so dramatic. Make sure that after you close the door and the oven returns to the desired temperature, you set it to the correct temperature in the recipe.

Sometimes, we recommend turning on the broiler at some point during baking (see the individual recipes for specific recommendations). Make sure that your oven is calibrated and that you use an oven thermometer to verify the temperature of the oven (see Modernist Pizza, vol. 1, page 392).

You can also stack two baking steels on top of each other to retain and radiate heat more evenly. Or you can separate them and cook more pizzas at the same time. If you are making pizzas frequently in these ovens, it might be worth investing in two steels. Keep in mind, however, that some oven racks can’t support the weight of two steels and the racks can bend and fall in the oven. Most baking steels won’t fit exactly on the shelves of a combi or convection oven, so you might consider getting custom-cut steel if you make pizza often. We recommend 1.25 cm / ½-in thick-cut steel or 2.5 cm / 1-in thick-cut aluminum.

We recommend using a pizza screen or parchment paper to safely transfer uncooked, floor-baked pizzas onto preheated steel. If you go the parchment-paper route, cut a piece of parchment paper slightly larger than your pizza prior to shaping your dough. For a 30 cm / 12 in or 35 cm / 14 in pizza, cut a 38 cm / 15 in round or square piece. From there, shape your dough and place it on the parchment paper or screen. If you are using a screen, be sure to coat it with a light layer of cooking spray and shape the dough on a generously floured surface. Apply the sauce, cheese, and toppings. Transfer the pizza, parchment paper included, onto a peel or the back of an upside-down sheet pan or cookie sheet. Then carefully slide the pizza onto the hot steel in the oven.

Baking Steels vs. Baking Stones and Cast-Iron Skillets

The next best thing to a baking steel is a baking stone. This functions in much the same way but doesn’t retain heat as well as the steel. You can use untreated paving tiles to replicate a baking stone, but you’ll likely need to put a grid of them in your oven to create an area large enough to bake a pizza on, which can be unwieldy. Paving tiles fit nicely in toaster ovens and can be used to improve pizzas that you bake or reheat in them.

Another great alternative to using a baking steel is making pizza in a cast-iron skillet or griddle, either in the oven or on a stovetop. You want to use something that is flat, shallow, and large enough to cook your pizza. We prefer round cast-iron skillets to rectangular griddles, but either will do (round cast-iron griddles with handles, similar to what sizzling fajitas are served on, work well). Be sure to preheat the cast iron to the temperature indicated in the recipe before making your pizza.

While cast-iron skillets provide consistent bottom heat to the pizza, they aren’t capable of giving you top heat. We like to use them in conjunction with a heat gun for the stovetop or a high-heat broiler in the oven to bake the cheese and toppings to the perfect doneness. We tried using a blowtorch to brown the top of the pizza, but it was less successful than the heat gun. The other benefit to using cast-iron skillets is that they are multipurpose. As a last resort, you can preheat a stack of three or four upside-down sheet pans to try to provide extra bottom heat to the pizza as it bakes.

Baking Steel Maintenance

Keep in mind that you need to maintain your baking steel (in much the same way as cast iron). Before using the baking steel, season it with oil and burn it off. Don’t wash your baking steel. If something gets crusted on it, scrub it with salt to clean it. Rub the steel with coats of oil in between uses so that it doesn’t rust. Using a pizza screen (see Modernist Pizza, vol. 1, page 388) makes it easier to load the pizza into the oven. Be sure to coat the screen with spray oil before using. Remove the pizza from the screen a couple of minutes after it goes into the oven so that the bottom of the pizza can brown properly. Slide a peel in between the pizza and the screen and then take the screen out of the oven with tongs or a kitchen towel.

If you want to master the art of pizza making, it’s important to have an understanding of how pizza bakes and how to work with your particular oven. While home ovens may present challenges, a baking steel can be a game changer. Whether you choose a steel, stone, or cast iron, these tools will help you achieve that perfect pizza crust, turning your home kitchen into a pizzeria. So shape that dough, top it with your favorite ingredients, and let your optimized oven work its magic!

Baking steels aren’t limited to just the oven—unleash the full potential of your new equipment with these five additional uses. Be sure to also check out our Pizza Gear Guide for more valuable recommendations on pizza-making equipment.

We are deeply saddened to learn of the passing of our friend Chef Thierry Rautureau. Here are a few words from our founder Nathan Myhrvold:

Thierry was a friend and a mentor. He taught me many important things about being a chef. I loved going to Rover’s. I went there frequently as a customer and also worked there as a stagier in the kitchen prior to going to culinary school in France. I worked there one night a week when I could get there from Microsoft. The school that I wanted to go to required real work experience in a French kitchen for their advanced professional course, and Thierry taught me very well.

At one point in the course, we had to bone a duck to make a very classic French dish, which was something I did a lot a Rover’s so I started working away. The chef instructor, who was very intimidating, came up behind me to observe my work and finally said: “You there. Where did you learn to do this? You know a duck like a Frenchman.” And I only know a duck like a Frenchman because of Thierry.

Thierry was a fantastic mentor. Traditional French chefs are famous for being loud and angry if you screw up. Thierry didn’t run that kind of kitchen. His kitchen was calm and generally quiet, even when he was disappointed if something didn’t work out right. There was no screaming. He had great stories of a famous three-star French chef whom he’d worked for earlier in his career. This chef would jump up on top of the stove, while it was on, and kick the pots and pans off when he was upset. There was none of that from Thierry. He’d experienced it in his apprenticeship, and he wasn’t going to pass that along.

Thierry liked to say that Rover’s was Northwest cuisine with a French accent—I always teased him that it was more like modern French cuisine, with Northwest ingredients. He did a tremendous job and he really broadened what fine dining in Seattle meant. Prior to Thierry coming, fine dining here probably meant eating at a steakhouse with a menu that hadn’t changed in 30 years. He brought a command of techniques that was worthy of any kitchen in France which he married with the incredible ingredients and the general sensibility people have about food in the Northwest. It was a tremendous combination.

We once got into a discussion about a conversation he had with a chef from France who was making fun of American food. Thierry got upset and he said, “Look, all of my ingredients here are better than the ingredients that I had in France for the dishes I actually cook.” He hugely defended this area. At one point I joked, “Well there are two things you’d have if you were in France—we don’t have Michelin stars here and the clientele to support it.”

This was early in his career at Rover’s. The local restaurant landscape is different now, but initially, Seattle was the sort of city where people would only go to a fine dining restaurant once or twice a year to celebrate a special occasion. It wasn’t something that you would do repeatedly. Thierry would tell me early on that he had more regulars from New York than from Seattle. The New Yorkers would be people who are attorneys or investment bankers or consultants working for Microsoft or Amazon or some other local company. And every time they would come to town they’d eat a meal at Rover’s as opposed to people he would only see twice a year.

Over time that changed. I think that’s really important because without having a clientele there’s a limit to what you can do as a chef. Thierry was the guy who really loved the quality of what he did. He was financially successful, but if he had been after the maximum profit margin, he wouldn’t have used as much fog gras, caviar, spot prawns, and other expensive ingredients that he used. He wanted to have the best and be generous with what he actually served.

Apprenticing at Rover’s started a long culinary journey that culminated in me writing the Modernist Cuisine cookbooks. After the first book came out, my team and I started doing dinners with long tasting menus for chefs and food writers who would come to our lab from around the country and the world. It was a tremendous honor when we got to cook for Thierry. He liked our food, which probably meant much more to me than many of the other food critics or folks who passed through; it was one of the proudest moments of my culinary career.

Thierry played a very important role in my life. I didn’t become a line cook and I didn’t open my own restaurant either. I was so into food and cooking that people would say, “Well, why don’t you have your own restaurant?” Partly, I’d seen how hard Thierry worked. I knew that wasn’t how I wanted to make a culinary contribution, but it was material in me then to start Modernist Cuisine. It really changed my life and the impact that I would have in the world.

Nearly 10 years ago we released our first coffee-table book, The Photography of Modernist Cuisine. That book showcased some of our favorite images from Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking and Modernist Cuisine at Home. Today, we’re excited to reveal a brand-new book, Food & Drink: Modernist Cuisine Photography, which goes on sale April 25, 2023.

Preorders for Food & Drink are available now through the Modernist Cuisine Shop as well as other online retailers including Amazon.com. The book features a fresh collection of more than 200 mouthwatering photographs from Modernist Bread and Modernist Pizza as well as Nathan’s gallery. The photos in this new book capture the stunning details of the foods and drinks we all love from a surprising, playful perspective—it’s a visual feast served up in a gorgeous coffee-table book. Here’s a sneak peek of what you’ll find inside.

The Story Behind the Book

When Nathan, a lifelong photographer, decided to create a cookbook over a decade ago, he saw an exciting opportunity to do something new in food photography—to portray food in new and unexpected ways that simultaneously draw readers in and illustrate the science at work in cooking.

Modernist Cuisine broke many of the rules for cookbooks, including how they should be illustrated. When Nathan and the team began working on the book, we wanted to explain the scientific principles that govern how cooking actually works and comprehensively cover all the modern culinary techniques practiced by the best and most advanced chefs in the world. We realized, however, that a conventional, text-heavy book on these topics might be a bit intimidating to all but a limited audience. The book had to be visually captivating. To do that, we developed an approach to food photography that leveraged technology to capture something new.

All art involves some amount of technology. The invention of oil painting, for example, radically changed what paintings looked like. While this has always been true for the creation of art, it is profoundly so for photography because the medium requires both advanced optics and chemistry to capture images on film. Digital photography and the software editing tools it has spawned are merely the latest in a long line of inventions that enable us to make images in new ways. The technology of photography is now changing almost daily, and we’ve embraced that. Many of these new technologies and discoveries (plus those we don’t even know yet) are tools that can be used creatively to do something extraordinary.

At the same time, we’ve also bucked the conventions for food photography. Nathan wanted to cut kitchen equipment in half to give people a look inside food as it cooks, capture alluring perspectives of food with high-speed video and research microscopes, and turn simple ingredients like strawberries and grains of wheat into stunning monoliths with macro lenses. We’ve custom-built cameras and lenses, developed special software for editing, built robots to perfectly sync motion with the camera’s shutter, and experimented with new photography techniques. The results are blueberries shot to appear like boulders, condiments exploding out of cannons, aerials of freshly harvested wheat fields, and wine catapulted to create the perfect splash.

Almost immediately after we released Modernist Cuisine, people started asking where they could buy prints of the images. The photos in our books have spoken to people who see food as we do—as something that inspires passion and curiosity. Art is a reflection of ourselves and the values we want to project. Food is an important aspect of many people’s lives; there have never been more people who self-identify as foodies.

It’s safe to say that Nathan and the team have taken a lot of photos—thousands and thousands of them—since we published The Photography of Modernist Cuisine. With so many new photos in our archives, we decided it was high time to create another coffee-table book for everyone who connects with food.

A Look Inside

The 216-page Food & Drink examines its subject matters through six different lenses—photography speed, photography scale, cutaway photography, portraiture, still-life photography, and playing with food—to illustrate how Nathan and the team play with different technology, equipment, styles, and perspectives to capture foods and drinks in a new light.

Some of the most recent photos capture subject matter that is moving too quickly to be easily seen by the human eye, such as a champagne cork flying out of a bottle, so we dedicated a chapter called “The Speed of the Photography” to highlight the speed at which they were taken. Another chapter, “The Scale of the Photography,” is devoted to the scope of the images and features photos that run the gamut from large landscapes to things that can only be seen under a microscope. The third chapter, “A Change in Perspective,” collects some of our photos that reveal a look inside food and what happens inside pots and ovens as you cook. Nathan likes to have fun when taking photos, so we also created a chapter called “Playing with Your Food.” The final two chapters divide a group of food photographs into two categories commonly found in the art world: “Still-Life Photography” and “Food Portraits.”

Food & Drink features imagery not found in The Photography of Modernist Cuisine, and the vast majority are also prominently displayed in our gallery spaces. The images in the book were shot both in studio at the Modernist Cuisine Lab as well as on location at Lake Geneva, the Italian village of Caiazzo, California’s Central Valley, New Orleans, the Olympic National Park, and the Palouse region of Washington and Oregon. With over 20 full-spread panoramic images, the book comes packaged in a new shelf-friendly trim size with a slipcase.

More to Come

While working on Food & Drink, we embarked on our next project, which will begin to tackle the world of pastry. It’s a subject matter we’ve always wanted and planned to cover. After narrowing down the scope of the project (a truly difficult task), we are now in the early stages of research and experimentation for the untitled, multivolume book that will cover baked pastries.

In the meantime, we hope that others will experience the wonder and joy we feel when we look at the photographs in Food & Drink. Gastronome Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously said, “Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are.” Food is a significant part of our identity. What we eat has never been more important to us than it is today. It’s one of the ways that we define cultures, different groups of people, and ourselves as individuals. Our relationship with food is deeply personal but also something that helps us build relationships with others. Food as art is an expression of those values.

Food & Drink is a reflection of our unending passion for and fascination with the world of food. It’s a bold guess that others will share our desire for an art book of quality that immerses readers in vistas of food that are familiar yet profoundly new. We hope that these photographs allow people to indulge in who they are and express how food makes them feel.