The Biggest Mistake New Pizza Bakers Make

Hey, friends, Martin here. We're outside today. I've got the Gozney Arc cranked up, and I wanna give you five tips for perfect bakes in your outdoor oven. 

Today, in order to illustrate these tips, we're using this beautiful little Gozney Arc. 

The first tip that I wanna talk about is basically know your oven. And what I mean by that is with time and practice and lots of repetitions, you're gonna begin to understand how this oven has low, medium, and high sort of temperature options. The way that I check that is with the use of an infrared thermometer. So I'm confirming the heat that I have using my infrared. For me, working in the low zone means that I'm in around 600 degrees, maybe up to 700 at the highest end of that lower spectrum. And then I have a medium spectrum, which is, say, 700 up to about 800. And then the highest zone that I'll ever work with is above 800 up to say 900 or so. In the low zone, I'm mostly cooking things like pan pizzas, Detroit-style pizza, grandma-style, those types of things. In the medium zone is actually where I do most of my work with my hearth baked pies. I find that working in the high zone, there's a lot more sort of risk than there is reward. So know your oven, figure out what low, medium, and high is, and then use an infrared to confirm those temperatures, double-checking how it is against the thermometer on your oven if it's included. Tip number two, preheat fully. What I mean by that is that I wanna make sure I give the oven ample time to get up to heat and then settle a little bit. So if I'm baking in the medium zone, say, 700 degrees or so, I want to get it up to at least 700. Often what I'll do is I'll even go a little bit beyond that and then I'll turn the oven down before I load. So basically I'm overheating slightly and then letting it settle, giving it plenty of time to preheat for my best possible result. And tip number three is load cool. And what I mean by that is not only am I bringing it up to temperature and then letting it settle a little bit, I'm also thinking about zones within the oven in terms of the layout. So in this oven, for example, I've got my heat on the left side. The flame curls up and over. On the left side of the oven is the hotter side. It's gonna be at least a hundred degrees hotter on that side than it will be on the right side. What I like to do is to load on the right side a little bit further away from the heat source. If you have an oven that has a flame in the back, for example, I often load closer to the door than I do in the depth of the oven. That gives me a little bit more control and it gives me some wiggle room if I'm a little bit too hot or if I'm not quite used to how often I have to rotate the pizza. It's just a little bit of insurance to make sure that I'm not burning things. And that brings us to tip number four, and it's observe and adjust. You're in here, you're watching the pizza, you're rotating as often as you need to. Sometimes it's every 30 seconds, sometimes it's a little bit more. Maybe sometimes if you've got it turned down a little bit and you're working in that low zone, it might be as much as two minutes. The main takeaway here is that you don't wanna step away. You want to be here, you wanna be present. You're the baker, so don't quit your job. And last but not least, it's tip number five. And what I wanna say here is that you really need to recharge between bakes. These ovens are small, they don't have a lot of thermal mass, and so we have to give some heat back to them after we bake each pizza, each pan, whatever it is. So recharge fully. Each time after you come out, turn that heat back up, double-check with your infrared thermometer and make sure that it's back up to heat, and then you'll be ready to go again. So there it is, five tips for baking with your outdoor pizza oven. So friends, the best way to learn how to make great pizza in an outdoor oven is to bake a lot of pizza. So get your reps in, and along the way, use these tips that we've provided. Happy baking, happy summer. Enjoy the pizza.