The Oven Temp Mistake To Avoid When You're Making Pizza

If you're craving pizza but don't feel like ordering delivery, there's plenty of homemade pizza recipes you can make in your own kitchen. Although you can buy ready-made pizza dough and grab a jar of your favorite tomato sauce, you can also make your dough and sauce from scratch to really impress your friends and family. While this might seem intimidating, there are tips from pros to guide beginners.

For example, the Pioneer Woman's secret to perfect pizza dough is about time and patience rather than cooking skill, so just make sure you plan ahead and let the dough rest overnight. And to bring your tomato sauce to the next level, be sure to add parmesan rind as your secret ingredient. But making the base of the pizza and gathering your toppings are only part of the process. Next, you'll need to bake your pizza, and there are a few mistakes you'll want to avoid.

Traditional pizza ovens get extremely hot, and King Arthur Baking says that wood-fired ovens for Neopolitan pizza can reach 900 degrees Fahrenheit. While you can make a delicious pizza at home without a wood-fired oven, one common mistake is keeping the oven temperature too low. According to Pro Home Cooks, one of the most important things you need to do while making pizza is to keep your oven hot.

Wondering why pizza needs to be cooked at such a high temperature? Pro Home Cooks explains that pizza dries out the longer it stays in the oven. This means you'll have to turn up the heat to make sure your dish quickly cooks through all the way.

Depending on what you usually bake, you may not have turned your oven up all the way to 500 or 550 degrees Fahrenheit. While you can follow the instructions of your homemade pizza recipe, Kitchn experimented with turning the oven dial all the way up and reported "that this was some of the best homemade pizza I've ever made."

Pro Home Cooks also recommends turning up your oven to its highest setting, along with preheating the oven at that temperature and baking your pizza on a cast iron or pizza stone. If you're making pizza at home often, it might be time to invest in a high-quality pizza stone to get a crispy crust on the bottom. We've rounded up the best pizza stones to buy as of 2022, and don't limit yourself to only using this tool for pizza. You can also use a pizza stone to get a tastier sandwich that will have you counting down until lunch.