So making a great pizza is a hobby I've been working at for some time. In particular, imitating the qualities of a Neapolitan pizza is what I've been striving for. This makes for an interesting challenge since real Neapolitan pizza is made in a wood fired oven at temperatures upward of 900F, and all I have is your standard electric oven that maxes out at 500.
So there are a couple important qualities that come from this high cooking temperature: a quick cooking time (~2 mins), a springy, crispy dough, and charring on the bottom of the crust.
Thus far, charring has been the most elusive quality to capture in an electric oven, but I finally got it.
Getting the pizza to cook in a few minutes was simple enough: put it on the highest rack you can get and turn on the broiler. However, while the top would cook well the bottom wouldn't be crispy and certainly not charred. A pizza stone was a mild improvement, but not enough.
What I needed was to transfer a lot of heat directly to the dough like the bottom of a pre-heated wood fire oven would. This is where I came up with the solution; I should maybe note here that this method is a wee bit more dangerous than your standard kitchen fare.
I could put the pizza pan directly on the bottom heating element of the oven, which at full blast is glowing orange nonstop. The pan would carry the heat and char the bottom.
The heating element is kinda a ring around the edge of the oven, so to get even heating I needed to rotate the pan a few times. The oven mitt did catch fire once or twice during this step.
After a few minutes and turning on a few fans to get rid of the smoke, the pizza was bubbling on the top so I moved it up to the broiler and set to 'broil'. After another two minutes, voila.
Per my postcard and per your affection for Pizza, I returned to Pizzeria Toro, the place I sent the postcard from. I snapped this picture of our pizza of arugula, porcini mushrooms and egg: and this picture showing the wood fire stove that I think you could appreciate:
No wonder I can't figure out how to make a decent Italian bread, even with a gas oven. I had no idea the wood fired ovens got that hot. The Safety Raj seems to think we clumsy apes are capable of handling a 1600-watt microwave, now. Maybe they'll relent on the 500-degree ceiling of standard consumer ovens, and then I can try making a steak "Ruth's Chris" style or something. Have you tried pre-heating the pizza stone outside of the oven somehow? I'm not sure how it would be done--wood fire in the back yard, table-top BBQ grill, or a blowtorch, maybe.
If you have a quality baking stone, then you can probably get decently comparable results. We're talking a stone a few inches thick here, and pre-heating times of an hour at least. Setting to broil would probably be the best way to preheat since it probably gets the hottest.
I've tried a few different temperatures and baking times, but I usually get a flattened loaf that resembles stale, unsweetend biscotti. Even the ducks at the pond wouldn't eat it. Sometimes I get a reasonable success, but maybe it's this new oven I have. It's a GE gas oven with loads of electronics, but unfortunately no circulating fan. My parents once had an oven with a fan and they got much better results with it.
This is fantastic; hazardous fire and tasty pizza!
I really just eyeball it all. The hard part is in the technique and baking. The dough is just flour water, salt and yeast. The sauce is chopped up canned San Marzanos, and the cheese here is pepperjack. The basil is doused in olive oil and put on the pizza immediately after cooking. There's also some artichoke hearts.