Zagarella Italian Restaurant

The local pizza place down the street your place has a couple pluses when it boils down to cooking their pizza's good and crispy. But, with a few of modifications to your kitchen instruments and techniques you can make a tremendous flavoured, homemade crispy crust pizza for your mates and family also.

The restaurant down the lane runs a commercial hearth that approaches temperatures of 800 degrees or hotter. This grants them an plus of baking at high temperatures for a brief period of time... giving a crisp crust.

Usually when we make pizza at home we set the oven at 350 degrees either because that is always what we do, or because the "recipe" demands for this temperature.

Here is the first secret. Turn up your oven as high as it will go! Our home oven displays 550 degrees and gets a little hot, so we most probably are reaching 600 degrees.

The market ovens also use a stone deck, or some type of heat conducting surface. These bases get very hot and keeps in the ovens heat, resulting in a surface that is also baking the crust from the bottom, as the oven heat is baking the toppings and top of the dough.

We have all experienced one of those take-n-bake pizza's with the damp bottom crust. They usually use some type of paper tray as a vehicle to carry the pizza home and to cook the pizza in. The issue is that the paper can't get hot enough to bake the crust of the pizza, and worse, retains the moisture in the dough.. .leaving for the base to be baked, let alone turn crispy.

Here is the second secret. Get yourself a baking stone. These are relatively inexpensive items that you set into your oven, pre-heat to as hot as your oven will go, and then place your pizza (or bread) straight onto the surface to cook. These provide even heat dispersion and their porous nature allows the moisture of the dough to release, resulting in a absolutely crisp crust.

One last advice. Since we are baking at a higher temperature, we will not need to bake the pizza as long. In some cases we may only need to bake it for 10 minutes or so, depending on the thickness of the crust.