About a month ago, I acquired a small commercial convection oven. This one is limited to quarter size trays, or roughly 9.5 x 13 inches. For small pies, I guess it's ok, but for the larger ones, they will wait for the day I graduate to something larger. The oven is a Wisco 620 (see first picture). It theoretically tops out at 450 deg.
I have made a few pizzas in it, with varying degrees of success. I think I need to work on a more appropriate dough recipe, to match the temperatures I can achieve. This morning I acquired a few pieces of tile. I had gone to the local building materials outlet store (eclectic barely describes the place) looking for unglazed quarry tiles. I ended up buying a few unglazed porcelain tiles. 3 of them fit neatly on one of the wire racks (see 2nd picture). They are 1/4 inch thick, as I did not see anything there that was thicker.
For my first attempt, I tried setting the rack on the center slots (thereby bisecting the outlet from the convection fan). I could, if anything thinks it would help, go back and pick up 3 more of these tiles, and populate an upper rack (which would be above the cooking pie).
The first attempt went reasonably well. The temp dial was set to max, 450 deg. I got good oven spring and the peperoni was crisping between 3 and 4 minutes. I pulled the pizza at 6 minutes (thinking it looked done). Sadly the bottom was crisp, but not quite as done as I would have liked. Some of the dough towards the center of the pizza appeared to be not fully cooked (and slightly gooey).
I need a different pizza dough formulation. This was done with something that was more of a bread dough. I do have a fair amount of All Trumps (bleached/bromated) and some fresh IDY. I'd like to try this again with a thinner crust, something that needs less heat to cook. I also ran into trouble getting the uncooked pizza to release from the peel. First time trying to drop a pizza from a peel, so maybe it's an acquired skill.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
Ray
