“Bought as a birthday gift for a family member whose current desire it to bake a pizza with a perfect crust. Very helpful woman on the telephone who also ensured that it was delivered in a tight timescale. It’s a very good looking piece of kit and has the weight needed to ensure a crisply (but not burnt!) base. The recipient is delighted and so am I. Great helpful advice from a relatively local stockist who have experience and thorough knowledge of their products. Why go to Amazon for goods of unknown provenance when superior goods and service are available?”
“Initial Reaction: Well made with no sharp edges and pretty much the thickness, weight and linear dimensions quoted. Hitherto I have been using - a stone slab which eventually cracked, followed by a mild steel 10mm thick plate whose day job is working as a Welsh Bakestone. The bakestone does pizzas and bread well but it has a tendency to corrode no matter how well seasoned it may be if the sauce spills over - AND .... there is also a lot of water in bread dough.
Today I cooked 2 Pizzas on the steel, the dough was way wetter than usual (a lot!) and re- weighing the dough revealed a shortfall of around 100g - obviously a gross mistake somewhere along the line but one I decided to go with. Dough was proved overnight in a warm fridge and divided up at 8am and then proofed again in a cold fridge at 2C til lunch time (dough was 80/20 strong bread flour/plain flour) with some oil, salt and a little yeast. The hydration was in theory around 70%; seemed way North of 80% to the hands.
The pizza was baked on parchment paper placed directly onto the GI Pizza Steel. The fan oven and steel were preheated together on maximum oven for around 45-50 mins at which point the oven was @ 280C and the steel registered 250C on an infra-red thermometer. All was then left for the heat to soak in some more - a further 15 mins. Immediately after the bake the steel had cooled to 200C.
Result: One of the best pizzas I have made and certainly the only pizza where having eaten 1/2 of it (I normally only eat 1/3) eating a whole second pizza seemed to be the very best idea that I had ever had. In the event I didn't but I did sneak a sliver of pizza no. 2 pictured below purely to evaluate the crust further!
The first picture is pizza no. 1 @ around 5 mins into the bake (max oven) - I put it back in for a further 2 mins with the oven turned off to make sure the centre was well cooked although it probably was already!
The second picture is of pizza no. 2 showing the dough structure and crumb.
In terms of star rating I would give the pizza steel (used for pizza) 4.5/5 stars - but only because I would never give 5 and it could even be a little wider and still fit my oven -
For bread well..... I don't know - it depends how much heat 4mm thick steel can hold; one or 2 kilos of bread dough has a lot more mass than say 350g of pizza dough - on the other hand 4 mm thick steel heats up completely a lot more quickly than 10 mm thick steel so maybe it's a question of swings and roundabouts! Very encouraging results so far, in fact I have just ordered a second steel.
H. Grocutt.”
