Pizza Stone vs. Pizza Steel: One is Better for Baking Multiple Pizzas

Much as the Stone Age eventually gave way to the Iron Age, pizza stones, once considered the best way to make quality pizzas in your home oven, have been pushed aside by the advent of pizza steels.

Putting a piece of heavy steel in your oven may seem a bit overboard, and hey, aren’t Neapolitan pizzas and New York pizzas baked on stone? Why do you need steel?

Well, Neapolitan pizzas are baked in wood fired ovens upwards of 900F and NY pizzerias use deck ovens that are able to heat the stone and the air above them at a much great temperature than a traditional home oven.

These hotter temperatures actually make a stone a better material for these type of ovens.

You aren’t working with wood fired or deck ovens, you’re playing around with a 30” box that somehow burns your cookies while leaving them raw in the middle. A stone is no match for your oven.

Enter the steel.

When we’re talking about the heat and material needed to properly bake a pizza in a home oven, conduction is king.Conduction refers to the ability to store more energy (heat) and transfer that energy into a product (the pizza in this case) quickly and efficiently.

Steel is much more conductive than stone. Where a stone absorbs heat and slowly radiates it, a steel holds its energy in until it comes into contact with the pizza where it quickly moves its energy into the bottom of the pizza.

Said another way, a 550F steel behaves much hotter than a 550F stone due to the speed at which the steel transfers its heat into the pizza, resulting in quicker bakes, and a crispier and lighter pizza with beautiful leoparding on its bottom (see Pizza Trial below).

Steels also need less preheat time compared to stones and they recover their temperature between bakes quicker than stones.

This means less waiting and more pizza eating - a very good thing.

There are some practical matters to keep in mind when comparing stones and steels. Stones are easier to move due to their lighter weight while not lightening your wallet with their affordable price. It is also true it is possible to bake a pizza on a stone in your oven.

Steels, on the other hand, can be heavy, expensive, and absolutely incredible for making pizzas at home.

So, is the burden of a steel’s weight and its cost something to negate its performance? Absolutely not.

For one, stones are not indestructible. Accidents happen, things drop, slip out your hand, and in a stone’s case, shatter all over the floor. That $50 stone now becomes a $100 stone with the purchase of your next one.

Ever see a piece of steel shatter when it falls on the floor? Maybe you’ve seen a floor shatter when a steel drops on it, but the steel is fine.

For all intents and purposes, a steel is indestructible and will last you forever. That slightly higher cost of a steel makes a little more sense once this is considered.

What about the weight? Steels are heavy - 13 pounds or more! A stone doesn’t come close to that.

Now, if only there was a steel that had built in handles that allowed you to easily pick up, place in your oven, remove from your oven, and carry wherever you needed to take it, all without fear of dropping it and damaging your floor. Where could a pizza steel like that be found?

So, what is the benefit of stone over steel?

The fact is, steel’s conductivity takes advantage of a home oven’s heat in a way that a stone just can’t, and the weight and cost is more than justified by the results.

None of this means anything if it doesn’t work in practice with actual pizzas.

To compare a pizza stone to pizza steel from a performance standpoint, the same exact dough was made for each pizza, mixed exactly the same way, fermented for the same exact amount of time, baked in an oven set to the same exact temperature, and baked for the same amount of time.

The stone used was a 0.6” thick cordierite stone, considered one of the best stone materials available for a pizza stone, and a 0.25” thick Pizzori pizza steel.

They were both preheated in the oven for a full hour before the first pizza was baked and stone and steel temperatures were measured with an infrared thermometer.

The steel’s temperature rebounds nicely, and even in the case of the third pizza being launched 90 seconds after the second came out, the steel held and transferred enough energy into the pizza to nicely brown and bake it.

The fourth pizza did not need a 15 minute “recharge” as 10 minutes was enough to get it back to the initial temperature.

Again, what these pictures can’t show you is how crisp and light these pizzas baked on the steel are.

They each have a pleasing chew, not doughy whatsoever, with a tender crust. The darker bottoms also provide more flavor than the lightly browned bottoms of the stone baked pizzas.

In the end, pizza steels turn out better looking and better tasting pizzas, one after the other after the other.

Note: Pictures of the top of the pizzas are not useful here as every oven is different in how it circulates air and whether the broiler is used or not to affect the aesthetic quality of the pizza. Testing was done to determine if the radiant heat of the stone or steel was enough to affect the tops of the pizzas and warrant their inclusion, but in the end it did not matter.