PIZZA Baking – Scientific Approach
I like Pizza I like it so much that I have wondered about how to make a perfect one. A perfect pizza to me is the one that has crispy crust while still has moisture from the sauce and the vegetables. This balance is not easy to achieve, and I have scratched my head several times to achieve it until I started thinking about making it in terms of principles of heat transfer, conduction, and convection.
Conduction heat transfer happens by two surfaces in contact. For example, a utensil on the top of the stove has fire touching it so the mechanism of heat transfer there is conduction. Convection heat transfer involves the movement of gas or liquid. Most of the heat transfer happens due to this movement. Radiation heat transfer involves the transfer of heat using electromagnetic waves, for example, heat from the Sun reaching Earth (Radiation is not relevant in Pizza making).
With this background, let’s look at the real question. Pizza has a dough base so if you put that base on one of the shelves of the oven, then you are asking Pizza to be cooked by conduction. Because the heated shelf of the oven transfers heat to Pizza dough. As time goes on, the bottom-most layer of pizza dough gets heat and then that layer transfers heat to the next layer of dough (it’s usually a thick dough), and eventually, the heat gets transferred to the sauce and cheese, and then vegetables.
Now the problem with this approach is that you need to constantly keep the shelf heated for the pizza to keep cooking, and the bottom-most layer of pizza dough gets charred or burnt due to this, and the top layers like cheese or vegetables do not get enough heat.
A lot of modern ovens have fans, and they can cook Pizza by convection that is all sides of the oven have a flame and then the fan evenly distributes (or convects) heat. The pizza base would turn out to be not crispy if we were to cook only via this method as the Pizza base usually needs more heat (thick base makes cooking it heat-intensive) than the top layers.
So, what is the best way to cook Pizza, you may have guessed it already, a combination of conduction and convection. Turn on the conduction setting in the oven and place pizza for 7 to 10 minutes so that the base is almost, 50 to 60 percent cooked and then use a convection setting so that top of the pizza including sauce, cheese, and vegetables get cooked without excessive water evaporation. Of course, the times mentioned 7 to 10 minutes vary depending upon the type of dough, its thickness, and the type of oven.