Hack Workshop: Brick Oven Pizza (Without A Brick Oven)

Image by Aaron LandryOver at Goodeater, Kenji Alt has posted his clever kitchen hack for making a brick-oven style pizza at home. Unfortunately, his method is somewhat time-consuming and fidgety. It also requires a gas stovetop burner, which I don't have.

Here are my modifications of his hack. My methods are (as yet) untested, but if they work, they should be easier and more elegant than Alt's.

Alt explains that the problem for the home cook who wants a brick-oven style pizza is primarily one of equipment. A brick oven functions primarily through radiant heat. The bricks are dense and massive, and absorb a great deal of heat. This is radiated off consistently, maintaining a very high heat in the oven. Even the bottom of a pizza is primarily cooked via radiation, since the dough is uneven and only touches the oven floor at scattered points.

In a home oven, the walls are made of thin metal. Radiation that comes from anywhere other than the heating elements is negligible. Ovens generally work by heating the air inside it and cooking via convection rather than conduction.

Alt's revelation was that the top and the bottom of a pizza don't have to cook at the same time. He cooks the top of the pizza under the broiler (a source of radiant heat) and the bottom of the pizza on a makeshift grill over a gas burner.

Here are my modifications:

• Method One: Take your oven racks and put one as high as it will go and the other as low as it will go. Crank the heat way up, keep the oven door cracked, and cook the bottom of the pizza on the bottom of the oven over active heating elements (if you can get the rack an inch less from the elements, that would be ideal). Then finish the pizza under the broiler at the top of the oven.
• Method Two: Use a pizza stone. Alt admits that a pizza stone solves half the problem (the bottom half) as long as you get it super-hot first. Why not use a pizza stone to cook the bottom and then the broiler to cook the top?
• Method Three: Hey. Why is method two split into two steps? Why not superheat the pizza stone, then cook the pizza on the pizza stone under a broiler? Shouldn't this properly cook both the top and the bottom of the pizza at the same time?

As I mentioned above, I haven't tested my modifications yet. If you try any of them out, let me know. Otherwise, I'll report back in my next collection of experimental results.