Blackstone ripped off the 2stone design, but they're both the two best pizza ovens that have been commercially produced for residential use. both have the rotating pizza stone with mega high BTU (60000) propane burner, 2stone's is moveable. major advantage over the ooni and roccbox products since you can slide it in and wait until it's baked without any tending needed.

i've been cooking pizza at home for the past 15+ years, built three different pizza ovens myself. I used the Breville Pizzaiolo for about a year before selling it, it's the best option available for 120V home outlets. Currently using a Blackstone. Use it for neapolitan, NY and new haven style, use my home oven for pan pizza styles like detroit and L&B spumoni gardens.

last cook was 16 pizzas for the block party.

i find most fresh mozzarella to be almost flavorless. usually melts nicely, but the more flavorful fresh mozzarellas use cultures instead of citric acid/vinegar. Or just use buffalo mozzarella.

long answer incoming. the main difference is the temperature you can cook at. most home ovens max out at 550F, blackstone and woodfired ovens can reach 900F ambient temperature or higher. the high temp lets you get charred spots (called leoparding when it looks like leopard spots) on your crust very quickly (2 minutes or less) while your home oven can sometimes struggle to even brown the dough in 10 minutes (using the broiler and high malt flour or high sugar dough can help with this issue).

New York style can be approximated in a home oven, some styles can be done perfectly well in a home oven, but Neapolitan needs 900F or hotter.

Differences in taste essentially come down to that temperature difference, foremost the char spots. Some people say there's a flavor imparted from the wood when you cook in a woodfired oven. I've never done a side by side comparison but it's not something I've ever noticed. Another reason I don't believe it is that smoked foods are generally cooked low and slow, while wood fired pizza tends to be the opposite, hot and fast. Slow cooking in a wood fire gives the smoke time to adhere to the food being cooked. For the low vs hot, low heat fire creates a lot of smoke, a wood fired oven running full blast will actually become smokeless (at 1100F).

There are also textural differences due to the temperature. Neapolitan pizza usually has a very soft crust, the high temp cooks it quickly without cooking off much moisture. This also means the crust doesn't really get crispy/crunchy the way New York style can.

some recent ones. the green is creamed chard. the one with onions is bbq chicken, red onion and some cheddar on top. these were from the same dough, but usually for the NY style I'd use a lower hydration.
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yes, i think these are made by chef'n but the important feature is the offset blades

as a comparison, the 16" Ooni ovens have burners at ~24000-30000 BTU depending on model, Blackstone pizza ovens use 60000 BTU burners, Versa uses 9600 BTU infrared burner below the stone, with 15000 BTU burner in back. Gozney Dome is 28000

this is a question of what type of pizza you're hoping to make. If you're aiming for New York Style or "American" Style (dominos/pizza hut) or Detroit Style or even New Haven style, you can get very good results from your home oven (whether it's gas or electric).

If you're trying to make neapolitan style, i would wait to see what kind of results people get from the halo (linked somewhere above) because the rotating pizza stone is a huge advantage over manually turning in such small ovens and for efficiency making multiple pizzas as the only cook.

Not sure i understand this complaint. Have you owned an oven with rotating stone? The 2stone and Blackstone pizza ovens both use rotating pizza stones, and it makes the oven easier to use. It's certainly not a gimmick... Whether it looks like trouble is a different question, I've replaced the motor twice in the 6 years I've owned the Blackstone, once free under warranty, once with $25 rotisserie motor. But, I've never had to worry about re-orienting a pie mid-bake

I'll also add that adding a motorized stone for the Ooni is one of the most popular mods (see fb group "ooni hack")

Honestly I'm surprised there are people who will spend $2000 on a pizza oven and then use a $3 jar of sauce but if you like it, do you.

For neapolitan i just add salt to a can of crushed tomatoes
(Find a brand you like, i look for ones that have only tomatoes or tomatoes and salt as the only ingredients) and use like that. In summer I'll chop up good tomatoes set them to drain in a strainer, blend/chop them after dripping for a while, mix with salt. For cheese i think buffalo mozzarella is worth the price, or stella brand fresh mozzarella if i can find it. Most fresh mozzarella doesn't have much flavor (if it has "cultures" in the ingredients that's good, if it has vinegar or acetic acid it will be bland)

For basically any other style i use serious eats ny style sauce recipe (sub crushed tomatoes for whole peeled). Use low moisture whole milk mozzarella (cultures in the ingredients here too) in block form, shred at home, don't use pre-shredded.

These are just for straightforward sauce and cheese pizzas obviously, but pizza works great with literally any toppings that go together. Just don't overload with toppings (especially wet toppings/uncooked vegetables), that's the downfall of many beginners.

it is a style called the Egg-Shell Crust. /blockquote>

That thin brown layer is very impressive, can you add some details about the dough ingredients and the preparation of the pizza, e.g. did you press it into a pan, rise it in the pan after stretching, oiled pan, etc?

Thanks!

Getting the balance right might be a little tricky, but you could use a steel heated to say 550 with the oven chamber at a higher temperature, which would be similar to a stone at 650 (or whatever), no?

You could give it a try with building and launching your pizzas on parchment paper, no flour/cornmeal needed, let the crust set a bit and then pull the paper out. trim the paper to size if you don't want it to burn before you remove it.

I've seen mention of something called secret low on the gas ovens, between the off position and the low position is my interpretation, like where the knob is pushed in?

whats your workflow for managing your starter and mixing your dough? I use sourdough for pizza (and anything that calls for yeast). The only truly detrimental effect would be if you're significantly over-fermenting your dough such that it becomes acidified and starts to break down. otherwise it's probably just a matter of mixing/kneading, balling and stretching. happy to try to help

this sounds like your issue. tripled in size is fully proofed+ and then letting it go longer the gluten is probably starting to break down from acidification.

Also, repeated stretch and fold is important for bread when you want the loaf to hold height/volume but much less important for pizza. in fact, it can be counter productive, developing gluten too well will make the dough elastic and resistant to stretching (if this does happen you want to stretch until it starts to pull back then let it rest for 5-10 minutes and stretch again, repeating as necessary to get to full size)

RVH 's referenced post is pretty good starting point but if you want to go pure sourdough and leave out the instant yeast, you'll be looking at longer proofing time than his two hours. That said, different starters run differently, especially when you account for all factors different ambient temperature, different flours, different water composition, different stage in starter activity. I'll write out something more in depth which may not be necessary.

Judging from your photos you're not aiming for neapolitan, so here's a rough edit on my (white flour) new york style dough, which is pretty versatile, all measurements done by weight (given in grams and bakers percentages), this will be six balls at 375g which I would stretch to ~16":

feed starter 8-12 hours before. I might do something like 50g starter, 100g water, 100g flour the night before if i know I'm going to use 150-200g starter in my recipe.

100% flour - 1290 grams
61% water - 785 grams
10% starter - 130g
3% sugar - 39g
3% oil - 39g
2.5% salt - 32g

in stand mixer, or by hand, mix starter into water, then mix in salt, then add flour, sugar and oil and mix until combined, knead/mix for a few minutes longer. let proof in bulk for a few hours, then divide into balls (look at youtube for some videos on how to divide and ball) then proof until fully risen (for this last step it might be helpful to proof in clear plastic or glass so you can see what the fermentation looks like more clearly until you get more experience to tell without this view; another way to do it which i use for some other doughs but not really for pizza, is buying a small graduated beaker, say 100 ml, pulling out 20ml worth of dough and proofing that alongside the rest of your dough, dough is fully proofed when beaker reaches 40 ml. )

that's my method for mixing dough. proofing times will vary, doing it in your oven with light on will speed up from room temperature.

for stretching techniques you might take a look at youtube also.

If you shred your own cheese it wont burn so unattractively

Yep, cellulose and starch are used to prevent clumping, both of which are not found in block cheeses or deli counter sliced cheese. They change how the cheese melts and how it burns.

Allergic to dairy or lactose?

or mill your own

What's your dough process and recipe? Dough acting elastic, like shrinking in on itself is actually too much gluten development. If it happens again, stretch as much as you can, let it rest for a few minutes then stretch again. How much did that dough weigh though? Looks small

just dump the dough, divide and ball, don't knead again. there's some kneading inherent in balling, but don't do anything more.

with 250g i think you may struggle to get any larger than 10 inch diameter in any case (without a rolling pin).

clever technique.. i do wonder how the automated presses don't stick to the dough... maybe low hydration and well-floured?

big fan of home milling. you should check out the lee household flour mill, makes by far the finest flour of any home mill I've tried.

nice oven!

Turns out it has gone up on price a little, it was 799 last i checked. But it's actually cheaper than the one he's already using (https://pleasanthillgrain.com/komo-duett-grain-mill-flour-grinder-flaker-wood-stone) so seemed like a reasonable recommendation.

Though I'd love to get a new Lee, i use a vintage one, they pop up on eBay pretty regularly, they've been produced since the 40s or 50s

As he says, even just a relatively small amount of freshly milled flour adds a lot of flavor to your baked goods. You can usually find some fresh flour at farmers markets in my experience (at least in the northeast US) if you wanna give it a try before diving in

those look reallllllll good

This will make pizza, but I don't see how there's any improvement over using that pizza steel under the broiler. Neapolitan style seems like a stretch when there's no charring or even browning on the cornice even after 3 minute cook times (as shown in the videos).

I think there's probably a similar design with a smaller radius bottom steel, such that a full blast gas stove burner would actually send flames around the steel into the dome, getting significantly closer to the heat of a wood-fired oven.

Pizzaiolo is very impressive for an indoor home oven, owned one for like 6 months (before flipping it for a profit ) Couldn't make big enough pies to satisfy me. It's too bad that we're somewhat hampered here in the US by 120V being standard.

start in your home oven imo

go out to some pizza restaurants and figure out what type(s) of pizza you want to make at home, this will help guide you to books and ovens

I was wondering why you only make 8" pies, but now I see it's because you're feeding them to 40" people

A portion of yeast dies in the freezer, and the longer it's in there the more will die. I think the recommendation is like 5x as much yeast if you're planning to freeze the dough

One of eleven pies baked tonight. Smoked pepperoni, red onion, fresh mozzarella, tomato sauce, parmigiano.

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Caputo 00 is "formulated for long fermentations and high heat ovens." I don't really know what that entails aside from it being unmalted (i.e. no added malted flour), meaning it does not brown easily, basically will not brown in a normal kitchen oven. The lack of malted flour also means it ferments more slowly than if it had the malted flour in it.

I usually cook in a high heat oven, but I do not seek out Caputo. I haven't noticed any improvement from it, and it is more than twice as expensive as other high quality, unmalted flours I can find more easily, like wegman's brand. Gold medal is also unmalted and available almost everywhere.

barbecue chicken is one of my favorites. what sauce do you use?

Pre-shredded cheese?

ya, pre-shredded cheese burns more easily because of the anti-caking agents

yes

a couple recent pies, part home-milled whole wheat crust, always sourdough

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Rorschach*

Still have trouble understanding what the gimmick is. it has a straightforward purpose of removing the need to manually rotate the pizza, which is necessary in most ovens.

It's definitely possible that Blackstone's oven is not the best implementation of the design, Everdure looks cool, at $800, I wouldn't recommend that or the current blackstone to anyone, but I got mine (previous version) for under $300, and that was before the ooni/roccbox/etc were even on the market. In my workflow, with bake times around 120 seconds, I can step away from the oven after launch, prep the next pie, and come back to a pizza that's been cooked evenly because it's been rotating.

As far as heat balance in an oven goes, it's much more important for neapolitan than other styles, and in my experience, almost every neapolitan restaurant I've been to is manually rotating their pizzas during the bake, it's simply too challenging to balance when a roaring fire is only on one side of the oven.

To your other point, there are rotating pizza ovens made by many commercial pizza oven manufacturers:
https://www.breadstoneovens.com/pages/rotating-floor-wood-and-gas-fired-brick-pizza-ovens
https://marraforni.com/discover-the-rotator-brick-oven/
https://fierogroup.com/twister-rotating-ovens/

Sadly my propane started to run outc6c8303b-4bca-4010-9242-205f9221e26f (resized).jpg