A temperature in a pizza recipe means one of two things. In a kitchen oven it’s the setting on the dial. In an outdoor pizza oven it’s usually a reading of the stone’s surface, taken with an infrared thermometer. Much of the confusion about pizza temperatures comes from mixing the two up.
Oven setting or surface reading?
Kitchen ovens are set by the dial. The oven’s sensor measures the air and switches the elements on and off to hold your setting. Modernist Pizza warns that most home ovens have a cheap and often inaccurate sensor, especially at the top of their range, and recommends keeping an oven thermometer inside to check it. If yours runs cool or hot, adjust the setting; the book’s example is an oven that has to be set to 475°F (246°C) to reach a true 500°F (260°C).
Outdoor pizza ovens are judged by the stone. There’s usually no thermostat holding a setting, so recipes and makers give a target for the stone itself, read with an infrared thermometer at the spot where the pizza will sit.
Don’t compare one with the other. An infrared reading of a steel in a 550°F oven isn’t supposed to match 550, and it may read low for reasons covered below. Never turn up the dial to chase a number on an infrared thermometer.
Temperatures by style and oven
| Style | Kitchen oven setting | Bake | Pizza oven stone reading | Bake |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Neapolitan-style | 500–550°F (260–288°C) | 6–10 min | 750–850°F (400–450°C) | 1–2 min |
| New York | 500–550°F (260–288°C) | 8–12 min | 700–750°F (375–400°C), gas ovens | 4–6 min |
| Roman tonda | 500–550°F (260–288°C) | 5–8 min | 675–750°F (360–400°C) | 2–3 min |
| Detroit (pan) | 500°F (260°C) | 22–26 min | Not supported | – |
| Sicilian-style (pan) | 450°F (232°C) | 25–32 min | Not supported | – |
These are the Pizza Planner’s bake windows for each style and oven, drawn from published recipes by Ken Forkish, King Arthur Baking, Ooni and DeliVita. They’re planning ranges, not guarantees for your oven. Round pizzas in a kitchen oven bake on a steel or stone preheated for 45 to 60 minutes (a pan pizza without one needs 25 to 35); pizza ovens need 25 to 40 minutes, or whatever the maker’s procedure says.
Two gaps are deliberate. Pan pizzas need a long bake at moderate heat: a fast, very hot hearth bake browns the outside and leaves the center underdone, so the Planner supports them only in a kitchen oven. And the Planner hasn’t validated a lower-temperature New York bake for wood- or pellet-fired ovens, so New York in a pizza oven is listed for gas ovens only.
The Breville Pizzaiolo countertop oven is a separate case: use its presets and the settings in its manual.
Why round pizzas want the hottest setting
In Naples, the EU specification for Pizza Napoletana bakes it at about 485°C (905°F) on the oven floor for 60 to 90 seconds. Forkish’s own wood-fired pizzeria takes about 2½ minutes, and his home-oven pizzas about 7 minutes at 550°F (290°C). The longer the bake, the more water leaves the crust: a home-oven pizza comes out crisper and drier than one from Naples made with the same dough. That’s why Forkish, and the Planner, raise a Neapolitan-style dough to 70% hydration for a home oven and keep it at 60% for a pizza oven. Modernist Pizza’s advice is short: most home ovens top out between 500 and 550°F, so go as high as yours will go.
The top of the pizza needs heat too, and much of it arrives as radiation from above. Hotter surfaces emit much more radiant energy: Modernist Pizza explains that emission rises with the fourth power of absolute temperature, so the comparison only works in kelvins. Doubling a Celsius or Fahrenheit temperature doesn’t give sixteen times the radiation; only doubling the absolute temperature does. For equal areas with the same emissivity, a surface at 400°C (752°F) emits about 4.1 times as much thermal radiation as one at 200°C (392°F), calculated in kelvins.
The EU specification puts a Neapolitan oven’s dome at about 430°C (806°F). On the same assumptions, a surface at that temperature emits about 2.5 times as much as a surface at 550°F (288°C), again calculated in kelvins. Treat that as an illustration, not a measurement. A home oven set to 550°F isn’t necessarily 550°F at its walls or floor, and these ratios compare what surfaces emit, not the heat that reaches a pizza: that also depends on the oven’s surfaces and shape, its flame or elements, and conduction and convection. Neither ratio predicts how fast an oven cooks. A glowing broiler element is hotter still; the book notes that a high-temperature broiler can reach 800°C (1,470°F). That’s why most home methods finish under the broiler, as described in how to bake pizza in a home oven.
Why pan pizzas run cooler
A Detroit or Sicilian-style pizza is thick, sits in a metal pan and carries a lot of cheese and sauce. It needs time for the heat to reach the middle, so King Arthur Baking’s recipes bake them at 500°F and 450°F in two stages: the dough first, untopped, for 10 to 12 minutes, then the topped pizza. Modernist Pizza recommends home ovens for pan pizzas for this reason, since they bake at lower temperatures than Neapolitan or even New York pizzas.
Preheating: the walls and the steel take time
Heating the air in an oven is quick. Modernist Pizza calculates that a typical home oven’s element supplies enough energy to heat the air to 475°F in about 21 seconds. The walls, and any steel or stone, store far more heat and warm up much more slowly. In the book’s infrared photos, an oven that beeped “ready” after 22 minutes still had clear cold spots, which is why the authors recommend preheating for at least 30 minutes, and note that a baking steel can take at least that long to heat fully.
The Planner allows 45 to 60 minutes for a steel or stone in a kitchen oven. Where a maker says otherwise, follow the maker: Baking Steel’s instructions for its 3/8-inch Pro call for 60 to 75 minutes.
Modernist Pizza gives two more preheating tips:
- Check the oven itself, not the steel. Point an infrared thermometer at the oven’s coolest corner. When it reads within about 9°F (5°C) of the setting, the oven’s lining has probably finished heating. This is a check on the oven walls, not a target for the steel.
- Start a little hot if your oven recovers slowly. If your oven goes higher than the temperature you need, preheat about 25°F (15°C) above it, then turn it back down once the pizza is in, because the oven loses heat as soon as the door opens.
Using an infrared thermometer
An infrared thermometer measures the surface you point it at, but only as well as that surface gives off heat. Modernist Pizza explains that shiny surfaces radiate less than dark ones; a clean firebrick floor, for example, has an emissivity of about 0.68 against about 0.95 for black soot. Bare or shiny metal reads low on most handheld thermometers; a dark, well-seasoned steel reads more reliably. Check your thermometer’s instructions on emissivity.
Use the readings for what they’re good at:
- In a pizza oven, read the stone at the front, center and back of the area where the pizza will sit, and launch when all three are in range. One reading is one spot, not a map of the floor.
- In a kitchen oven, compare one session with the next, or the surface before the first and second pizzas. A drop tells you to give the surface longer to recover.
- Never treat a reading as the oven setting, or raise the setting to make a reading match it.
Pizza ovens: the maker’s procedure first
For an outdoor oven, the manual sets the lighting, fuel and preheating procedure; the stone reading tells you when to launch. Adjust the flame for the style before you launch: New York needs controlled, lower heat, not the full flame used for Neapolitan-style. Ooni’s troubleshooting article on burnt bases points to excess dusting flour and suggests keeping the stone at or below 450°C (842°F). That figure is Ooni’s burnt-base advice for its own ovens, not a universal limit or a target for every style; your model’s manual covers its cleaning and hot surfaces. Between pizzas, let the stone recover until the reading is back in range, rather than launching on a fixed countdown. The oven guide has model-specific steps.
Time follows temperature
There’s no universal maximum bake time. The bake windows above run from 1 minute for a Neapolitan-style pizza in a pizza oven to over 30 for a Sicilian-style pan. Forkish bakes his New York cheese pizza for 9 to 10 minutes at 550°F without the broiler for a crisper crust, and his margherita for about 7.
What does matter is the window for your style. If a thin pizza needs far longer than its window, look at the heat first: a short preheat, a surface that hasn’t recovered from the last pizza, or a heavy, wet topping load. The pizza is done when the base is browned and cooked through and the toppings are ready, whatever the clock says. The Pizza Doctor can help narrow down which it is.
Sources
- Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, Modernist Pizza (2021), volume 1: printed pages 351–353 (radiant heat, the fourth-power law in kelvins, emissivity and broiler temperatures) and 389–393 (oven calibration, home-oven settings, pan pizzas, preheating and the infrared photos, the coolest-corner check).
- Ken Forkish, The Elements of Pizza (2016): chapter 2 (baking times in Naples, at Ken’s Artisan Pizza and at home; hydration for a home oven) and chapter 7 (Pizza Margherita and New York Cheese Pizza).
- European Commission, Regulation (EU) No 97/2010, Annex II: the Pizza Napoletana specification (floor and dome temperatures, bake time).
- King Arthur Baking: Weeknight Detroit Pizza and Sicilian-Style Pizza. Checked October 14, 2026.
- Baking Steel: Baking Steel Pro product page (preheat time). Checked October 14, 2026.
- OpenStax, College Physics 2e (2022), section 14.7, “Radiation”: the Stefan-Boltzmann law in kelvins, and emitted against net radiant heat transfer. Checked October 14, 2026.
- Ooni: “My pizza is burning”, Ooni help centre (excess dusting flour and the 450°C stone guidance for burnt bases). Checked October 14, 2026.
- Ooni and DeliVita published recipes for the pizza-oven surface ranges, as used by the Pizza Planner: Ooni classic pizza dough, Ooni New York-style pizza and DeliVita Romana Tonda, as recorded in the Planner’s sources. Checked October 14, 2026.