During the summer, my campground has one or more pizza parties where we buy about 50 pizzas from the local joints. Last summer, I convinced everyone that we should invest in professional pizza ovens. We bought two Bakers Pride electric ovens that each have two 18" stone decks. The ovens could get up to 600 degrees, but could NOT sustain the temperature after putting a few pizzas through them. I suspect that by the time we got to the 50th pizza, we were cooking at about 350 degrees. It was taking 20 minutes to cook a pizza, and the crusts were soft.
Recently, one of the campers took it upon himself to buy an old propane-powered Blodgett oven. He says it's large enough to cook eight 16" pizzas at once. The only problem is that it has metal decks. I'm used to cooking on stone decks. He checked into Fibrament stones, but they'd cost more than he paid for the oven.
So I'm trying to figure out what the best way would be for us to cook pizzas in this. Does anyone simply cook the pizzas on the metal decks? Or do you need something else, like a pan or a screen? What might most closely resemble what I'm getting using a 550-degree stone?
