Brick ovens have been around for centuries, and for good reason—they produce uniquely spectacular pizzas. Get ready for a brief (and delicious) lesson in physics you’ll actually remember!
What makes brick oven pizzas special
Neopolitan-style pizzas are special. The crust is crisp and flecked with tell-tale charred spots, evidence of being baked in an extremely hot oven. The interior of the dough is soft, elastic, tender, and fragrant, and the toppings are cooked to perfection.
To achieve this perfect pizza, Italian pizza pros rely on brick ovens that typically heat to 700ºF (or more!). This high temperature cooks the pizza fast—we’re talking under two minutes!
The reason brick ovens can achieve such pizza perfection is due to the thermal conductivity of the bricks, or how efficiently they transfer heat into the dough. When comparing clay (the main component of bricks and your pizza stone) and steel, clay is much more slow to heat something placed on it, and this means that even if two ovens made of each material are heated to the same temperature, the crust in the brick oven won’t get nearly as hot as the crust in a steel oven. Don’t miss these pizza toppings you won’t be able to resist.
Along those same lines, the toppings in a clay oven have more time to cook before the crust is done; in a steel oven, the crust will be burned at such high temperatures before the cheese is even melted. Brick ovens are ideal because the crust heats at a high but reasonable temperature giving the toppings enough time to properly.
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Source: Grace Mannon (https://www.rd.com/food/recipes-cooking/why-brick-ovens-make-best-pizza/)