this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2026
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I definitely recommend a scale for any recipe using flour.
You can make due with premade sauce and crap olive oil until you can afford to upgrade.
I don't have a pizza stone. Can't afford it. I have a large cast iron pan I put on the bottom rack. This destroys the cure but it means any yard sale cast iron will work.
Second worst argument I ever had with my wife was whether to weigh or measure by volume the flour.
Weigh the flour. It will save your marriage and your pizzas
After I prepped the dough my wife made pie crust. I weighed the flour for her and she was deeply confused why she just couldn't scoop it.
I have a couple pizza stones, and they're drastically overrated IME. The point is supposed to be about concentrating heat on the bread more than the toppings, and stone / ceramic just doesn't hold heat as well as steel does. Last time I tried using a stone, I preheated the oven almost full blast for something like 45min, and the pizza still took a longass time to bake.
The point of an authentic brick pizza oven is to get the surfaces holding as much heat as possible so that the pizza only takes ~3min to bake, but that just wasn't happening with these pizza stones. The point of ~3min bake time is that the bread gets fully cooked by the direct heat transfer, while the toppings remain very fresh due to only being exposed to heat in the air.
When I researched, I found that "pizza steels" work vastly better. Evidently, you get one sized to your oven so as to leave a margin around the rack area so that heat exchanges well from top to bottom. Particularly if you only have heating elements on the top or bottom. An alternative I also read about is getting yourself firebrick (which has higher heat resistance than regular brick) and layer that across your rack, and it should also store up a lot of heat.
Bottom line, I suspect that you're in great shape using cast iron, etc and leaving pizza stones to the frou-frous.
Yeah, steels are definitely better (got a cheap one at aldi a few months ago for $20), but I used stones for years before I got the steel and they do work. But in my experience stones are what I would consider the basic option, as you can pull it out and get a decent bottom, but steels are definitely better, even cheap ones giving a crisp bottom quickly. However, I recommended the stones mostly because there will be someone who will think a baking sheet is fine, and those generally aren't (too low thermal mass, occasionally warp in the amount of heat that you will be cooking a pizza at, etc), whereas I've seen decent baking stones at the same price or lower than a baking sheet (seen at ~$5 a few times at aldi).
I guess my issue with stones is that (ideally) I'm aiming for the best pizza-baking experience, which is to me, brick-oven style, where the pizza bakes in a flash. I've never been able to do that with the stones I have (they don't hold enough heat), consistently making for mediocre-good pizza, no matter how much care I take in all other steps. *shrug*
I've looked around my area and haven't found fire brick available anywhere. I want to make pizza oven in the yard.
I just picked up 140 bricks from the ruins of my neighbor's house. I need 400 for a walkway I'm putting in. If I have enough leftovers I might dig deep enough (2') to get some clay and use it to make a cob oven with the bricks so that the clay protects the bricks from cracking but still work as an insulator to trap heat. Stretch goals.
Yes. I have permission to glean their bricks. Payback for installing security cameras and dealing with the cops every time someone thinks they can just go through someone else's burnt out private property.
As a fan of John Plant / Primitive Technology I love the cob oven idea, or some equivalent.
Before my disability worsened (in which pizza was just too much work), I had the idea of trying to save some coin and find the equivalent of a "pizza steel" without the markup. Maybe an ~8th of an inch thick, sourced from scrap or something. From what I understand, it works *almost* as good as an authentic brick pizza oven, which is really saying something.
Given how awfully mediocre most pizza is across the States, it almost seems like there's a good business idea there. Making delicious pizza at a low cost and selling it at the local farmers' market, or something like that...
Pizza isn't covered under cottage food laws. So many licences and certs needed. You could sell just the crust under most cottage food laws. Take and bake kinda thing.
We have a really good place in town that makes dough a day in advance and gets a proper char on it. I'm not 100% on their toppings but the crust makes up for it. So I'd have some tough competition.
In my adventures I keep an eye out for any scrap that might be reusable. If I found a decent piece of steel it would make my year. I'd be pulling one of my three angle grinders out to make it the perfect size.
Sounds like a plan!
Thanks. I knew I was overlooking something, but not what, exactly. :S