I sat at the bar counter right in front of the Pizzeria Paradiso wood fired oven in Washington DC and watched the pizzaiolo. He used a standard short handled wood peel to shove the pizzas in but a very long handled steel peel to move the pizzas around and pull them out. I suspect their oven was around 800-900 degrees.

I remember the days of them burns.. Invested in a longer and sturdier peel..

Oh, yeah, jettababs, those pink burn scars all over your arms and hands! and you got so you just "knew" without looking when a pizza was ready, even if there were ten of them in there.

I agree with Rando, when I was cooking in a pizza restaurant, our ovens ran around 600F, give or take. Most of our pizzas were thin crust, and seemed to take around 5-10 minutes, depending on toppings. Strombolis took a little longer. I still have burn scars on my arms from reaching into those infernos, and the guys who’d been there a while had asbestos fingers.

I preheat the oven to 400F 5 minutes, put the pie dough only in for 8 minutes to bake a little.
Take out, LEAVE OVEN ON add sauce, cheese, butter on crusts, sprinkle some garlic powder, put back in oven 10 minutes at that 400F.

I use a metal jelly roll pan so my pizza is always rectangle and saucy and delicious, crust is a bit thick but not sicilian style.

when I was a pizza jockey years ago our ovens were around 600-700 degrees… but we opened and closed them a lot, we were busy. I would say 550 would work OK. I have done home pizzas fine at 500. they don’t have *quite* the same texture as those done in pizza ovens.

I bought the top of the line freestanding GE Profile electric double oven. The shallow top oven is excellent for pizza baking and even has built-in settings for either regular pizza or store bought frozen pizza. I’m not sure how that works. There is no explanation in the manual but I suspect it might have something to do with the heating elements. They are in both the top and bottom of the shallow height oven. The temperature can be set to 550 degrees and I preheat a stone.

This is a promo picture of the oven.

This is a pizza result.

You’re probably not going to reach the high temps of a wood or coal burner used in some of the the best pizza joints. Those reach 900+ degrees. Some folks report pretty high temps in their home electric oven by disabling the door lock mechanism and using the cleaning cycle for the cook. I don’t recommend that. My electric oven, set at 550, tops out at about 575 after a 1 hour preheat. Most of my pies turn out like this one in about 7 minutes.

You should head over to www.pizzamaking.com for some great hints and examples of homemade pizzas.

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"Another Saturday, Another Pizza – PICS"

Davydd has some instructions for making good pies at home and plenty of pictures to prove it.

Forget the oven-put your pizza on the Grill(gas)-preheat untill 700-throw rolled out dough right onto the grate-it will sear-and start to krisp right away-they place a layer of prov. cheese-(sharp)-to keep dough from getting soggy-then place sauce and cheese-then turn off one side of grill and place the pie on the off side-letting cheese melt-you may need to rotate pie a few time to prevent burning of the edge-pizza comes out slightly burnt-wonderful-once you try it you will not put a pizza in the oven again.(if you do try a cast iron pot-like deep dish-sides are all crusty.

Yes…..the hotter the oven the better…………… on most residential type ovens you’ll be lucky to reach 500 degrees but on a GE electric you’ll get 550+ no problem………
I also found that using a regular thin 16×16 tile from Home Depot ($1.15) will cook the bottom of your pizza better and it’s faster to heat up then the thicker Pizza tile sold at Cooking specialty stores.
I put my cold /dry thin tile in a cold oven………… turn up the oven to max 550 and in 7 min both the oven and tile are ready……………

I liked a shorter peel, more control, easier to manipulate.w