The Pizza Lab: Bringing Neapolitan Pizza Home (aka ‘The Skillet-Broiler Method’)

Real food science — bringing the physics along with the recipe.

It’s basic thermodynamics. Air at a given temperature has less energy than stone at a given temperature. Because of this, even if both my stone and the air in my oven are at 550 degrees, the part of the pizza in contact with the stone cooks much more rapidly than the top. By the time the bottom is crisp, the top has yet to take on any significant color.
The solution to this is quite simple, and happily makes for a much cooler kitchen as well: forget preheating the oven: just use the broiler. A broiler not only cooks via hot air like the oven, but more importantly, it adds a significant amount of radiant heat to the mix, cooking the top of the pizza directly with electro-magnetic waves—a much more efficient means of heat transfer.