Pizza stones Tips please 1679

Edwin Pawlowski

Precisely. But with radiation heat transfer proximity is of primary importance, typical home ovens are not constructed to take advantage of radiation heat transfer. With commercial baking ovens the heating elements are typically situated intimately proximate to the oven's brickwork, often set within slots or even through holes in the brick, whereas it is via radiation that the bricks actually become signicantly hotter than the oven chamber because then the oven chamber is heated via conduction directly from the bricks rather than directly from the elements. With a commecial oven the bricks are actually part and parcel of the heating elements, essentially the bricks *are* the heating elements. However, pizza stones added to a residential oven cannot be situated so they can take advange of radiation heat transfer to any meaningful degree, and in fact they tend to hinder the oven's normal convection, even with forced convection ovens. And of course residential elements are not nearly powerful enough, or configured properly, to transfer meaningful thermal energy to slabs of stone. And the fact that they take so long to heat (stone is a very good good insulator precisely because it's a very poor conductor) is significant in that once cooled they do not recover well, especially via conduction. And stone can in fact be cooled remarkably rapidly. In fact a slab of stone can be lava flow hot on one side and simultaniously be stone cold on the other (again, stone is a lousy conductor), which is why NASA uses ceramic tiles for space ship reentry and which is *precisely* why pizza stones are essentially worthless. Imagine, idiots are paying $30 for 40¢ worth of fire brick, just to convince only themselves that they know about baking. And then the imbecilic cooking supply ads (written probably by moronic restaurant critic types who never actually cooked anytrhing) claim "porous" and "dense"... which is it, can't be both. The very same idiot restaurant critics who write prattle like the perfectly rare steak arrived at the table steaming hot. duh