The local pizza shop down the road your house has a some pluses when it boils down to preparing their pizza’s good and crispy. But, with a couple of alterations to your kitchen instruments and methods you can make a tremendous flavoured, homemade crispy crust pizza for your mates and relatives also.
The diner down the street operates a commercial oven that reaches temperatures of 800 degrees or higher. This gives them an benefit of baking at high temperatures for a short period of time… giving a crisp crust.
Most of the times when we make pizza at home we keep the oven at 350 degrees either because that is always what we do, or because the “recipe” demands for this temperature.
Here is the first secret. keep your oven as high as it will operates! Our home oven says 550 degrees and gets a little hot, so we most probably are reaching 600 degrees.
The market ovens also utilize a stone deck, or some type of heat conducting medium. These surfaces get very hot and trap the ovens temperature, ending in a surface that is also cooking the crust from the bottom, as the oven heat is baking the toppings and top of the dough.
We have all experienced one of those take-n-bake pizza’s with the damp bottom crust. They usually use some type of paper tray as a vehicle to carry the pizza home and to bake the pizza in. The problem is that the paper can’t get hot enough to cook the crust of the pizza, and worse, traps the moisture in the dough.. .leaving for the base to be cooked, let alone turn crispy.
Now comes the second secret. Get yourself a baking stone. These are comparatively inexpensive items that you put into your oven, pre-heat to as hot as your oven will reach, and then put your pizza (or bread) straight onto the surface to bake. These ensures even heat dispersion and their porous property allows the moisture of the dough to escape, resulting in a absolutely crisp crust.
One last tip. Because we are cooking at a hotter temperature, we will not need to cook the pizza as long. Often we may only need to bake it for 10 minutes or so, depending on the thickness of the crust.