Start Here

If you’re new here, this is the orientation I’d want on day one — the shortest honest path from “my pizza is a soggy disc of regret” to bakes you can repeat on purpose.

The order of operations surprises people

Everyone starts by shopping for an oven. Wrong end of the process. Pizza is a 48-hour craft with a 90-second finale, and the finale gets all the attention because it has fire in it. In my dough log, the single biggest quality jump anyone makes is not gas-versus-wood — it’s moving from same-day dough to a 24-48 hour cold ferment. Flour, water, salt, a pinch of yeast (or a spoon of sourdough culture, if you keep one like I do), and a fridge. That upgrade costs nothing and outperforms most hardware.

Start with the oven you already own

Before buying anything, run the benchmark I keep publishing against the specialty ovens: a 6mm pizza steel in your kitchen oven, max temperature, broiler protocol. A steel turns a home oven into a credible NY-style machine, and it teaches you dough handling, launching, and turning in a forgiving environment. If you outgrow it — and you’ll know, because you’ll start craving 60-second bakes the steel can’t reach — then the oven-class question matters: portable gas for convenience, dual-fuel if you want the wood ritual, indoor electric if your winters look like mine in Sweden.

The two numbers that run everything

First: hydration — water as a percentage of flour weight. Start at 62-65%. Wetter is not better until your hands know what they’re doing. Second: stone temperature — not air temperature, stone. An IR thermometer gun costs less than a bag of 00 flour and replaces all guessing: 380-420°C for Neapolitan-style, lower and longer for NY. The stone temp decides when you launch; the clock never does.

What to read next

Take it in this order: the guides for dough schedules and launch technique, the oven setups page when you’re choosing or upgrading hardware, the tools page for the dough numbers I keep at the bench, and the glossary when you hit a term like leoparding or biga.

One promise

No mysticism here. There’s no nonna secret and no magic flour — there’s hydration, ferment time, stone temperature, and a launch you’ve practiced. Weigh everything, write it down, change one variable at a time. The pizza gets good embarrassingly fast once you treat it like the process it is.