Working with a wood fired oven, you can easily get it over 900°F. Slide the pizza in, a minute and a half later, you can slide out a perfectly done, thin crust, Neapolitan masterpiece.

If you’re stuck with a conventional oven that tops out at 500-550°F, you might think you can’t come close to a wood fired oven.

The trick to get a surface to be even hotter so you can get closer to the results of a wood-fired oven is to use a cast iron pan, which is preheated on the stove, and using the broiler to hit the top of the pie.

Clever and worth a try.

My friend Gary tipped me off to this technique which he saw in this article at Lifehacker . Thanks Gary!

Researchers working on standing wave ultrasonic motors (SWUMs), were trying to describe the physics involved when they realized that they operate on similar principles as pizza tossing.

“The dough spins just like the rotor spins because the chef tosses the rotor just like the motor does; the differences between the two are just really in the details. Turns out no one had apparently thought about how to really toss pizza, either, so that became a bigger part of what we looked at with this, and when we found that experts tossed pizza exactly as the theory said they should for optimum results, we were thrilled.”

Well, that kind of takes a little of the mystique out of it, don’t you think? On the other hand, maybe they can get some grant money to perfect the pizza crust?

Do you think pizza throwing is art? Or is it science?

Source: The Physics of Pizza Tossing (physorg.com)