Is the Baking Steel too heavy?
In 2012, two days before our Kickstarter launched, I got a long email from a tester in Europe.
She loved the steel. But she thought it was too heavy to sell.
I was horrified. My Kickstarter was in 48 hours and the product I'd spent six months building, making pizzas daily, testing seasoning oils, dialing in manufacturing, was apparently too heavy for the world.
It wasn't the first time I'd heard it. About two months earlier, a marketing professor from Boston University came by the plant. I thought it was a brainstorm session. It turned out to be a pitch, she wanted $30K for research and development. And before she got to the ask, she made one thing very clear: the Baking Steel was too heavy for retail. Her research, she said, would focus on the commercial side instead.
I wanted to toss her out the window. I didn't write the check.
Before I launched, I'd taken a tape measure into Home Depot and measured every oven I could find, double and triple checking that a 16x14x¼ inch steel would fit. I was working in my dad's plant. We made industrial things. Heavy, serious things built to work. The Baking Steel was not going to be any different.
At 15 pounds, it was by far the heaviest pizza "stone" on the market. I wasn't sure it would work in retail. But I loved it. And my testers loved it.
Then my dad walked in and saw the look on my face. I told him maybe we should drill holes in the steel to lighten it up. He's a product designer. He just shook his head.
Trust your gut, son. You designed this thing. You tested it. Give it a go.
So we launched. Unapologetic. 15 pounds of American steel.
Here's what I knew then and what 13 years has confirmed: the weight is not a flaw. The weight is the product. That mass is thermal energy storage. It's what gives you the 18x heat conductivity advantage over a pizza stone. It's what blisters a crust in under 6 minutes in a home oven. Without the weight, you have a glorified sheet tray.
In all our testing, ¼ inch was the baseline. Go thinner and the physics stop working. The Pro is 3/8 inch and 27 pounds. We're not going in the other direction.
The Baking Steel is heavy. We're proud of that. And we're never drilling holes in it.
Funny enough, we just launched a 72-hour pizza dough mix. Wonder what the professor would think of that one.
About the Author
Andris Lagsdin is the inventor of the Baking Steel and founder of Baking Steel Inc. In 2012 he connected his family's steel fabrication background with a passion for great pizza and launched the original Baking Steel on Kickstarter. Since then Baking Steel has become the benchmark for home pizza performance, trusted by 500,000+ home cooks worldwide. Everything he builds, he tests in his own kitchen first.
