On Apr 5, 9:17*am, Brooklyn1 <Gravesend1> wrote:
> On Thu, 05 Apr 2012 07:08:53 -0400, Gary > wrote:
> >Jim Elbrecht wrote:
>
> >> Yes the stone is in the oven so it preheats. * * My oven's top setting
> >> is 550. * * *When the oven is 550, the surface of the stone is 600+.
> >> [the commercial oven is over 700F]
>
> >> *When the pizza is slid onto it immediately sears and crusts the
> >> bottom-- and transfers more heat quicker than air would.
>
> >I'll have to try a stone. I can see how a preheated stone will hold it's
> >heat when you open the oven door to put the pizza in. Most of the hot air
> >will escape in that move but the stone will still be hot.
>
> The temperature of the stone will drop dramatically as soon as raw
^^^^
SURFACE

> dough with wet toppings is laid on it... and as you admit most of the
> hot air will escape when the oven is opened, therefore the recovery
> rate for the stone will be nil.

So nothing can ever be baked, because the hot air escapes the oven
when you open the door to put the food in?

> Real brick ovens are heated directly,
> residential ovens are heated secondarilly by air that first needs to
> be heated. Pizza will be fully baked and out of the oven before the
> temperature of the stone recovers.

Brokelyn is a little bit right even though he is mostly wrong:

1. The stone is a heat storage device -- slow to heat and slow to
release heat. If heat is analogous to electrical charge, the stone is
a capacitor.
2. Thus even after you open the oven door, the stone retains heat --
unlike a metal pan. (It would be interesting to try to make pan pizza
with a preheated cast iron pan, though.)
2. Only some of the heat that the stone retains is transferred
immediately to the pizza; the remainder is transferred more and more
slowly.
3. The stone is heated through all three means: radiation, conduction,
and convection. Radiative heat transfer from the burner-heated oven
bottom occurs constantly, which tends to maintain the amount of heat
in the stone. Once the door is shut, the conduction and convection
mechanisms come back into play.

So, where was he right? First, the stone has to be fully heated for it
to be effective Let it soak a couple hours in the hot oven. Second, no
home oven I've seen can approach the heat of a commercial oven. That's
why I precook any raw toppings, so that all the heat goes to baking
the dough and melting/browning the cheese.