Ken Forkish thin crust pizza.

[Garvinque]

Can't wait to see the final results, Good Luck!

 

Garvin

[Syzygies]

22 hours ago, HalfSmoke said:

He's also trying to replicate Neapolitan results in a home oven at 550 vs 900 in a wood fired oven.

A number that keeps rising like a tale told in a pub.

I've taken various cooking lessons with Rosetta Costantino (My Calabria, Southern Italian Desserts). She's a smart enough engineer to have retired wealthy at an age where most people's careers are just getting going, so I trust her science. She went all over Italy with an infrared thermometer, inspecting these wood fired ovens.

Yes, you can measure 900 F in such an oven, but this is never the temperature that the pizza experiences. Hotter than 550 F yes. 900 F no.

Of course the first error is the belief that a number describes a fire. We all stick our bare hands into the air of a 450 F oven without incident, but not into 450 F fat. Neapolitan ovens are tuned to not actually incinerate their pizzas; the heat transfer coefficients of the oven floor are crucial.

I cooked a steak once at 900 F, and didn't eat it. There are incidents, like watching one's winter shell tear like paper on a mountain top at minus 30 F, that teach us we don't really understand physics outside our narrow experience range. When an Eskimo dies from botulism by fermenting in a plastic pail, after their ancestors used seal skins for centuries, I outwardly bemoan their tragic scientific ignorance. Inwardly I tell myself it would be evolutionary pressure if I did something that stupid. I have no confidence that fat cooked at 900 F is safe for human consumption, after seeing my steak 20 seconds into that fire. It could be just fine, but the truth is that we don't have an experience base to assure us this is safe.

Fortunately, this is not what Neapolitans are eating.

[tony b]

Like a friend reminds me occasionally - "We're all gonna die from something, so it might as well be from something that we enjoyed!"