What's The Best Temperature To Cook Pizza In The Oven?

It's easy to tell when you've undercooked a pizza: The crust hasn't browned at all, the middle looks too chewy, and the dough will be soggy in a very gross, unappetizing way. There's also some risk: Raw dough can contain pathogens that you'd kill by cooking properly, and a pizza isn't safe until it's entirely cooked. When you ask about the ideal temperature for baking a pizza in a standard kitchen oven, the conventional wisdom is "as hot as your oven gets." A common mistake with cooking pizzas is temperature, and whatever temperatures you're used to cooking at, you likely need to go even higher for a pizza.

The standard pizza-baking temperature for a normal oven is about 500 degrees Fahrenheit, although 450 or 475 degrees is usually considered alright. Compared to a pizza oven, you'll be firing up a normal oven for longer: You'll need to preheat the oven for a minimum of 20 minutes, although most people preheat their oven for 30 minutes or more. Then you bake the pizza for up to ten minutes until the crust is crispy and the cheese has properly melted. Afterward, your leftover pizza should stay fresh for four days.

It's completely fine to cook pizzas in a normal oven instead of a specialized pizza oven, which can be pricey and is only worth it if you're serious about making pizzas. That said, the oven in your kitchen can't match up to a pizza oven's high heat, which cooks pizzas at 800 to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. At these temperatures, the pizza is cooked fairly quickly, in under a few minutes. In either case, work with the heat you have, and keep in mind that you can set the oven lower if you're cooking Chicago deep-dish style (though it should cook for longer because of those giant crusts).

There are also tools that can help your pizza come out evenly cooked at slightly lower temperatures. A simple pizza stone — a ceramic, porous slab that more evenly distributes heat and absorbs moisture — can be a useful investment, and it's much cheaper than a pizza oven. When cooking with a normal baking sheet, you risk undercooking the pizza's center and overcooking the outer crust because heat isn't spreading evenly, so you might end up with soggy dough in your pizza. It's something to consider if you're serious about pizza.