The physics of baking good pizza

Check out pizzamaking.com. It's probably the central place to chat about all things making pizza. While a home oven will get you decent pizza with a good stone, there are outdoor solutions that aren't too expensive. I got the blackstone oven, and it makes Neapolitan-style pizza in about 90 seconds, just like a large wood oven does. The difference is it uses propane with a giant flame arching over the pizza, and it has a motor to spin the pizza/stone inside. It was about $400, and well worth it if you want that style pizza.

This post encouraged me to make account and leave a comment after couple years of read-only

/sorry for bad english/

Long ago, in yearly middle-school time I am argue with friends about optimum(by combined simplicity and taste score) way to bake frozen pizza, and all about with electric heating oven VS microwave. After some time oven was chosen, but I thinked that made oven pre-heaten was waste of time and try to approximate it with longer cooking in just powered oven. I have been tried to made some calculations with paper and microcalculator. Some years after I remembered it and understood that I was reinvent some integration stuff.

And pizza was burnt because all of this distraction

I was going to post the same link. I've always gotten amazing results with that recipe and my 8mm thick 8kg baking steel.

After breaking several conventional pizza stones, I figure this one is going to last for decades or even centuries. And there's just something so satisfying about a big honkin' slab o' iron like that.

"You can put a touch of sugar in the dough, or you can put a touch of sugar in the sauce, but don't put it in both. Corollary: If you put pineapple or other sweet toppings on the pie, don't put any sugar in the sauce or dough."

As an Italian, I feel the urge to jump in here. Sugar in dough is used to kickoff/boost yeast levitation, while sugar in sauce is used to affect tomato acidity. In both cases, they are not intended to provide your pizza with a sweet taste. If for some reasons you like some sweet flavor on your pizza, you should at least take into account the fact that it comes as a byproduct of diverse chemical reactions that affect consistency and PH of your pizza in multiple/subtle ways.

I think there's probably some cultural assumptions in your list. I tend to assume Neapolitan style when talking about pizza, but I know this is not the default for most people.

That is - 450C (at least), cooking time under 90s, thin / crisp crust, with minimal toppings. In AU this is not hard to find, but there certainly are plenty of chain pizza restaurants that go for the heavy, piled-on, thick crust, 10 minutes to bake/boil. I gather in the US there are regions where the latter (Chicago perhaps?) is the default, but I'm not sure how common the genuine Neapolitan style is - in availability or popularity.

Anyway, to your list -- if toppings are flowing at all, you've got too many toppings. You definitely do want high protein flour - at least 12%, or higher if you can find it. When I lived in the UK this meant imported Canadian flour as the domestic product simply couldn't do it. In AU it's hard to find much above 12%. If you need to cool your pizza for 2-5 minutes before cutting, it's too big. : ) Agreed on avoiding cheap (or rather, low-quality) ingredients. Less is more on toppings - but go for the most exquisitely flavoured varieties you can find. Sugar .. I think is not needed. Tomatoes are high in sugars, and good flour really shouldn't need the additional sugars for the yeast. If it's for flavour only, then I can't help.