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DG_

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  1. Reviving this a bit to help out @KiwiIndo and @remi - I received my 32" KK over the winter and did some pizza testing this month. Our pizza background: we've made pizza several to many times a month for years now from scratch. It's fast if you plan ahead, you can vary the toppings based on the season, and if you make an extra, you have a solid lunch for the next day. We have a secret sauce recipe and use the dough recipe from Roberta's (yes the 00 flour is important). There are a number of good ways to get the dough ready, including making it ahead of time and letting it rise in the fridge overnight. Anyway, here is the real KK content: commercial pizza ovens run 700-800F. Why? The dough needs to get to ~400F via conduction from your stone and your sauce and cheese will continuously vent water vapor (boil) at 212F from convection and radiant heat. Conduction is much more efficient than convection, which allows you to have the two sides of the pizza reach these respective states at the same time - this is THE most important thing to cooking good pizza and allows you to keep the pizza in the oven/KK for as little time as possible. Here is what happens when you cook pizza on a KK based on time and temperature: You bring your KK up to 550F and properly heat soak the pizza stone: This is the equivalent of cooking pizza at max temp on an indoor electric/gas oven. It's fine and even good, but it's not the same as a professionally-cooked, wood-fired, brick-oven pizza. You bring your KK up to 700F, but don't maintain the heat long enough to get the stone to temp: This will result in too much bubbling. Your pizza will dry out and your cheese will scorch. The heat will penetrate the dough too much by the time it's cooked, resulting in a more dense and less springy crust. You bring your KK up to 700F and properly soak the stone for at least 45 min: This produces legitimately restaurant-quality crust without burning or bubbling away your toppings. The crust will have that slight char and crispy exterior with the correct chewy and open crumb of a professionally-equipped pizzeria. At this temp, it takes me exactly 5 minutes to cook two side-by-side pizzas on a 32" KK at 700F after a heat soak. It might vary a touch if you make your dough thicker or assemble your pizza too early, such that the dough starts absorbing liquid from your sauce, but get your timing down so you never need to check on the pizza mid-cook. Start with a very full basket and clean out any ash as others have recommended. To get to 700 is fairly easy with enough fuel and enough air - however, you really don't want it to run away from you; at 700 dome temps, accidentally touching grates etc. can produce hospital-level burns. Make sure you have a long-handled pizza peel. My most successful run last week had both vents fully open, plus the ash dump grate pulled out for extra air initially. I used the top vent to slow my ascent as I crossed into the 600s, and then once I was around 675, I closed the ash dump grate. You can then fine-tune from there. Here is an after shot of one of my runs last week. Note that one side of my KK seemed a little hotter than the other, and the crust on the right-hand pizza is a little over. I probably needed another 5-10 minutes to soak is my guess.
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