No way, right? There’s no way that you could replicate the intense heat of the wood-burning ovens of Naples, Italy, right? I mean, Jeffery Steingarten tried:
Not long afterward, I slid a raw pizza into a friend’s electric oven, switched on the self-cleaning cycle, locked the door, and watched with satisfaction as the temperature soared to 800°. Then, at the crucial moment, to defeat the safety latch and retrieve my perfectly baked pizza, I pulled out the plug and, protecting my arm with a wet bath towel, tugged on the door. Somehow, this stratagem failed, and by the time we had got the door open again half an hour later, the pizza had completely disappeared, and the oven was unaccountably lined with a thick layer of ash. I feel that I am on to something here, though, as with the controlled use of hydrogen fusion, the solution may remain elusive for many years.
That was just one of his attempts and his concluding advice really doesn’t give a good, replicable method that anyone could achieve at home.
I had tried for a while to recreate the pizza I had in Naples. Pizza stones, quarry tiles, broilers, grills, grilling then broiling, par-cooking the crust, you name it — but nothing came close. My oven gets to around 550F, which makes a nice pizza flavored casserole (I have actually turned out very, very good Chicago-style “pizza”), but it doesn’t give you that charred and blistered bottom, bubbled and puffy crust, and puddles of melted mozzarella sitting atop a few dollops of very plain but transcendent tomato sauce. You can’t do it without the heat.
And then Comcast gave me about 30 new HD channels.
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