(upbeat music) - Today we're going to talk about two ways to cook great pizza at home. I have the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo which is a countertop over that is designed specifically for pizza. - We're gonna compare it to the much less expensive and modest, baking steel which you can put in your home oven and bake pizza directly on it. - We're going to see how it goes. - So you want me to start that off? - Just trying to get the
crazy out of my eyes. (laughing) - So Lesley, let's talk about the most important things when we're making pizza. - You really need your oven to be as hot as possible because the goal is to get a crispy crust, with a nice chewy outer ring, and all of your toppings to melt at the same time. - And another important
thing is the actual surface of what you're cooking on. You really need something that's going to hold a lot of heat and then deliver it to the crust to give
it that crispy bottom. - There are dozens of other variables like dough recipe, and you
know, sauce and all that stuff. All right, now let's just explain what these things are, okay. (upbeat music) The main feature of this oven is that it gets up to 750 degrees, which is way hotter than any home oven I've ever experienced can get up to. Just from the outside it looks like a really fancy toaster
oven, but if you open the door you can see that the oven cavity is narrow, you know, there's
this pizza stone in here. There's not a lot of headroom in here. It really is for flat
wide things, like pizza. If you look at the control panel, it, you know, it's another clue that it is a pizza centric oven, with you know, markings like frozen, pan, wood fired, and New
York, and thin and crispy. And we're going to be
using the preset modes today because they're kind of perfect, like this thing has been designed within an inch of its life. It also comes with its own pizza peel. I have to tell you, I was very skeptical about this pizza peel because I like either wood or, what do you call that. - Composite. - Composite. - I got there, we got there. (laughing) - Metal peels are usually aluminum, and aluminum is a very like sticky metal, so I thought that this
thing would just stick, but it doesn't because it is a super slick stainless steel, and it
really did surprise me. (singing) (upbeat music) - This is a three-eighths of an
inch thick piece of steel. - Which goes in your oven, it absorbs your oven's heat. - Holds it. - It holds it, and then whatever is put directly on top if it gets that blast of heat, and that's how your pizza's gonna get that oven straight through direct contact. - Right, right, because the oven itself can only get up to 500 degrees, so this won't necessarily
make the oven hotter. - No. - It just stores the heat so that when you put the pizza on it, it can deliver it to the crust. - Right, and how long
does this take to preheat? - This takes an hour
to an hour and a half. - This thing takes 15 minutes to preheat. I'm not saying I'm better. (laughing) (whacking) I gotta turn my oven on. So now we're gonna make pizza. (gentle upbeat music) All right so, you wanna
know my dough recipe? - Tell us. - I'm not gonna tell you. So I made this two days ago, and I let it rise in the fridge, and then put some semolina on your peel before you stretch this out so you have a landing pad for it, but not too much, don't get crazy. - Don't get wild. - So now it's just a hair above room temp which is where I like it. I like to make a little border with my finger tips like that, and then I just go around and do concentric circles and just get that going. And I pick it up, and we're just gonna let gravity do it's thing. - [Michael] Just work your way around. - Do you like making pizza? - It's sort of like reminds me of being a child, you know. - Yes, it's like play dough. So I like to stretch it from the outer edges because the middle tends to get really thin, really fast. Let your hands and fists just kind of like do that for ya. I'm just gonna lean over and do this, and put it on my peel. - She's beautiful. - It can slide. All right, now I'm ready to dress. I'm faster than you. Sparse, sparse, you don't
want too much sauce. That's why I like to use a small ladle so I don't accidentally
dump a ton of sauce on it. This is fresh mozzarella cheese. I like to slice it and lay it out on some paper towels to
soak up the excess moisture. I'm sure that is not the classic Neapolitan way to do
it, but you know what? I'm in New York. - You know what, we're in New York. - We're in New York. I'm not in Naples, and
I can do what I want. And I don't like to put
too much in the center because it'll just like make it all soggy and that's not fun. You're gonna do peppers and what? - I think olives. (gasping) - [Lesley] All right, you ready? - [Michael] That's good. - All right, so. - In she goes. - Mine's going in on
the wood fired setting, which is their Neapolitan style. I'm going to press go, which is that, and it's going to do it's thing. What's really important is you're going to bake a pizza in the
Pizzaiolo, that's very hot. Or in the oven, you want to like rotate it half way through
the cooking process. - Yeah, the other good thing about the steel is that because it's so wide, you can sort of position it when you put it in the oven on one
side, then when you go to turn it, you can move it
to the side that's hotter. - Yeah. - You know, and then kind of like manipulate it a little bit. - Fresh surface.
- Yeah. - Full of heat. I'm really excited. Mine's gonna cook for two minutes. Michael's is gonna cook probably for five. - Mine's gonna take a little longer. - Now we're gonna take it out. Finished pizza. - [Michael] Wow, it's beautiful. - Thank you. Oo! - She's very crusty, this one. - Okay, so, let's compare. (gentle funky music) Nice and spotted. - [Michael] This is
pretty evenly spotted too. - [Lesley] Yeah! - [Michael] Yeah. - You don't have--
- Yeah, mine's a little more pale,
not as much leopard spotting. - But yeah, that's nothing to do with the steel though, that is everything to with our
objectively bad oven. - Bad oven. - I got more leopard spotting also because, you know, there are two like heating elements in here,
and there's an outer ring heating element that is dedicated to cooking this outer
crust, and that's how I got leopard spotting
because it's so close to that heating element, and I get that concentrated heat. - Yeah, and mine's a little more pale because I don't have that intense heat coming from right directly above it. But even though it's not a great oven, it's just still-- - [Lesley] A beautiful pizza. - A beautiful pie, yeah. - It's a gorgeous pizza. I wouldn't kick that out of bed. - No!
- No! - That's nice spotting on the bottom. It's very evenly cooked. The steel, you know, it's not gonna, if you have a terrible oven, it's not gonna solve all your problems. - No. - You know, there's still gonna be the quirks that you have to deal with. If you have hot spots in your oven, you're still gonna have
to work around those with the steel, so it takes a little, that's a little bit of a learning curve, but you kind of play with it. (gentle music) - So after comparing these two methods of making pizza, our verdict is the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo really does bake up stellar pies. It's easy to use, the preset functions are pretty spot on, but it is very big, and it costs $800. - Yeah. The steel, on the other hand, did a really admirable job. I think it comes very, very close to the Breville. You don't get quite as much of the leopard spotting on the top, but
this is a lot cheaper too. So if you're not going to be making pizza all the time, it's
probably a better choice. This is just over $100 for the steel. - They're both respectable pies, they're both delicious. Really the choice is up to you. Yeah.
- Cheers! - [Both] Mm! (laughing) - I got lipstick all over my fingers.
