Pizza Bake Time and Temperature Chart

Bake time is set by the temperature of the stone floor, which is the surface the base of the pizza touches. Not the air, not the shell, and not the built-in gauge, all of which can differ from the floor by 200F in either direction. Every figure on this page describes a standard 12 inch pizza on a stone floor, and every one of them comes from the same anchor set that drives the bake temperature and time calculator.

Every temperature on this page describes a surface that will burn you. A 900F stone will ignite a wooden peel left resting on it and scars skin on contact. Use long-handled tools and EN407 rated heat gloves , burn fuel outdoors only with clearance from anything combustible, keep children and pets well back, and never pour water on a hot stone: the steam scalds and the thermal shock cracks it.

What is the bake time at every floor temperature?

This is the main chart. Read down to your measured floor temperature and across for the bake time, how often to turn, and what the dome should be doing while the floor does its half of the work. Times are for a standard base thickness with a normal topping load. Multipliers for everything else are in the next table.

The curve is deliberately not linear. From 950F to 850F costs you 30 seconds. From 650F to 550F costs three minutes, and from 550F to 450F costs seven more. Above roughly 750F the base is flash cooked and the water in it never gets time to leave. Below 650F the base has to dry before it can brown, and drying is slow. That is the entire reason a 550F home oven produces a different kind of pizza rather than a slower version of the same one.

How do thickness and toppings change the time?

They multiply it. A cracker thin base runs at 0.85 of the standard time and a pan pizza at 1.6, because in both cases the number that changes is how far heat has to travel to reach the middle. Toppings add a further 15 percent when heavy or wet. The two multipliers combine, so a loaded pan pizza takes 1.84 times the standard time.

Two rows in that table are warnings rather than instructions. A thick base on a 900F floor chars underneath long before the middle is cooked, which is why the 1 minute 34 second figure is arithmetic rather than advice: bake thick bases at 650 to 700F instead. A very thin base at 550F dries into a cracker before the cheese browns, which is the reverse mistake. Match the base to the floor and the multipliers stop mattering. The oven temperature by style chart pairs them up style by style.

Why does the pizza need turning so often?

Simple arithmetic. At 900F, the edge of the pizza nearest the flame receives enough heat to blacken in about 20 seconds, while the far edge is still setting. Leave it still for a minute and you have one carbonised side and one raw one, from a bake that only lasts 75 seconds in total. That is why the turn interval in the main chart shortens as temperature rises rather than scaling with bake time.

Above 800F the interval is 20 seconds. Between 750F and 825F it stretches to 30 seconds. From 650F to 725F a turn each minute is enough, and below 650F a single rotation halfway through the bake covers it. You cannot do any of this with the peel you launched on: a large launcher has nowhere to go inside a 12 inch chamber, and dragging it across the stone strips off the flour bed. A small round turning peel lifts the pizza an inch, spins it and sets it down, and above 700F it is the tool the bake depends on.

Turn by lifting and rotating, never by pushing. Pushing smears semolina and rendered cheese fat across the floor, both of which burn and then stick to the next pizza. The full sequence from bench to plate is in the guide on launching without sticking.

How long does the oven actually need to preheat?

Longer than the manual says, because air heats in minutes and stone does not. The gap between those two is where most first bakes go wrong: the oven reports temperature, the cook launches, and the base comes out pale under a blistered top. The claimed figures below are roughly right for the air and the shell. The realistic column is for the floor.

The recovery column is the one that surprises people at a party. In a portable oven the floor comes back in a minute or two. In a domestic oven a steel needs four to six minutes to regain what one pizza took out of it, and a stone needs longer still, which is why the third home oven pizza of the evening is usually the worst one. Both surfaces are compared properly in the pizza steel roundup.

How do I measure the floor temperature properly?

Point an infrared thermometer at the centre of the stone, roughly where the middle of the pizza will land, from about a foot away and at a slight angle rather than straight into the flame. Take a second reading near the mouth. Portable ovens routinely run 50 to 150F cooler at the opening than at the back, which is another reason a pizza needs turning even in a gas oven with no visible flame on one side.

Two common measurement errors are worth naming. Aiming through the flame reads the flame, not the stone, and returns a number several hundred degrees too high. Aiming at a patch of burnt semolina or a scorch mark reads a surface with a different emissivity and returns a number that is simply wrong. A dual-laser gun that marks the edges of the measured spot removes most of this, and the options are compared in the infrared thermometer roundup.

An infrared gun cannot read dough temperature, only surfaces, so it is not the tool for fermentation. That job needs a probe, and the timing side of it belongs to the proof time calculator. Between them the two instruments cover both halves of a pizza: what the dough did before the bake, and what the stone did during it.

What do the failure modes look like at each temperature?

Almost every complaint about a pizza oven is a symptom of the floor and the dome being out of balance rather than of a wrong dial setting. Naming the pattern is faster than changing recipes.

• Burnt on top, raw underneath. The dome or flame is far ahead of the floor. Run at full power for 20 to 30 minutes, then turn down and let the stone catch up before launching.
• Burnt base, pale top. The floor is too hot for the style, or the base is too thick for that temperature. Drop to 650 to 700F for anything that needs more than about three minutes.
• Pale everywhere after a long bake. The surface is not conducting. In a domestic oven that is the case for a steel over a stone, plus the broiler running through the bake.
• First pizza perfect, third one soggy. The floor has not recovered. Check it between bakes and wait for the number rather than the queue.

If the base is the persistent problem rather than the timing, the causes are worked through in the guide on why a pizza base is not crispy, and the dough side of the same question is on the hydration chart.