What Is a Pizza Steel?

I invented the first one in 2012. It's called the Baking Steel®, and it started the whole category. Here's what a pizza steel is, what it's made of, why it works, what it costs, and the part I got wrong for ten years.

The record

These are the verifiable facts about how the Baking Steel began.

• In August 2012, I launched the Baking Steel on Kickstarter with a $3,000 goal. We hit it in one day.
• During the campaign, Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats asked to test one. He wrote that it beat his favorite pizza stone, and backers doubled.
• The first steels shipped in 2012.
• "Baking Steel" was registered as a US trademark in 2023, Reg. No. 7,118,479.
• Serious Eats retested the field in October 2026 and named the Original the best pizza steel, and the Baking Steel Pro their best upgrade pick.
• Every steel is still made at Stoughton Steel in Hanover, Massachusetts, the shop my father started in the 1970s.
• More than 200,000 home cooks have one.

Why steel works

A home oven tops out around 500 to 550°F. A pizzeria oven runs much hotter. You can't change your oven, but you can change what the pizza sits on.

Steel conducts heat about 18 times better than a ceramic pizza stone. The moment your dough hits the steel, heat rushes into the bottom of the crust. That's what gives you oven spring, char and a crust that's crisp instead of pale and soft.

It also holds a lot of heat and gives it back quickly. After one pizza comes off, the steel recovers fast, so the second pizza comes out like the first. That's where a stone falls behind.

What a pizza steel is made of

A pizza steel is made of low carbon steel. That means it has under about three tenths of a percent carbon.

Cast iron has 2 to 4 percent carbon. They are in the same family, with a very different amount of carbon. That difference is why cast iron is brittle and cracks, and why carbon steel bends before it breaks. It is also why I can back a steel for life.

Carbon steel and cast iron conduct heat at around 45 to 50 W/m·K. A ceramic pizza stone is under 3. Stainless is about 16. Those numbers matter because a pizza steel's whole job is moving heat into dough.

Stainless pizza steels exist. I tried stainless in 2012 while I was working this out. I made one pizza on it and never went back. The pizza came out flatter and pale on the bottom. Chromium is what makes stainless stainless, and chromium is a poor conductor. The thing that stops rust also stops heat.

A pizza steel is plain carbon steel with no coating. Leave it wet and it will develop surface rust. That is normal, the same as cast iron, and it is not a defect.

Is a pizza steel just a piece of steel?

You can buy a raw plate and cook pizza on it. But a raw plate off a steel supplier isn't flat enough or clean enough to cook on. Every Baking Steel is surfaced flat, because a plate that rocks on an oven rack cooks unevenly.

We shot blast each plate to remove the mill scale and leave a slightly rough surface for seasoning to grab. The edges and corners are broken by hand, so you can safely pick up fifteen pounds of hot metal. Then we season it by hand with organic flax oil and bake it on before it ships, so it arrives ready to cook on.

We make it at Stoughton Steel in Hanover, Massachusetts, my family's shop. It carries a limited lifetime warranty against defects. I invented the category in 2012. That's the difference. You can decide if it's worth $139.

No coatings. Nothing to wear out. It gets better the more you cook on it, and it'll outlive you.

Do pizza steels really work?

I put a thermocouple on one to find out, so I could stop guessing.

One Original, a Monogram electric oven set to 550°F, cold start, probe on the surface of the steel and a second probe reading the air.

The steel hit 553°F at thirty minutes and 597°F at an hour. So it gets where it needs to go, and then some. The thicker MC Edition took about 48 minutes to cross 550°F, which is why I tell everyone to give it the full hour regardless of which steel they own.

But the number that matters isn't the preheat. It's what happens when you open the door. Sixty seconds with the door open and the oven air fell to 401°F. The steel was still sitting at 513°F. That gap is the whole reason a steel works. Air loses its heat the moment you open the door. Fifteen pounds of carbon steel does not. Your pizza doesn't bake on the air, it bakes on the steel.

Then I turned on the broiler, because I like to. The steel went from 585°F to over 700°F in under three minutes and leveled off around 708°F.

Your oven can't get to 700. Your steel can.

One oven, and I'll say plainly that I sell the thing I tested. Your oven will read differently than mine. I bought a thermocouple rig to get these numbers because I wanted to actually know, instead of repeating what everyone says about preheating. More ovens are coming.

Full data, every reading, every five minutes: How Long to Preheat a Pizza Steel? I Put a Thermocouple on It

What I got wrong

For over ten years, I taught convection for pizza night. It was in my class notes, my brochure, and posts on this site.

This month I put a thermocouple on two steels and tested bake against convection. On convection, after opening the oven door, the steels stalled around 538°F for five straight minutes. On bake they climbed right back, the Original to 585°F. Convection still works. Bake is better, especially when you're making more than one pizza.

Testing is how I learn, and I'm rewriting the old posts.

Pizza steel vs. pizza stone

A stone does the same job, slower.

Stones are ceramic or cordierite, and ceramic is a poor conductor. It takes longer to preheat, it gives heat back slowly, and after the first pizza it needs time to recover before the second one bakes like the first.

Stones also crack. Thermal shock, moisture, a knock on the counter. Most people who've owned one have broken one. A steel doesn't crack, doesn't chip and doesn't need replacing.

Where a stone still wins: it's lighter and it's cheaper. If you make pizza twice a year, a stone is fine. If you make pizza because you love making pizza, you'll want the steel.

I wrote the full comparison here: Baking Steel vs. Pizza Stone

What it costs, and what's in it

Pizza steels generally run between about $50 and $200, and the spread comes down to thickness, size, flatness and whether it arrives ready to cook on.

The Baking Steel Original is $139. It's 14" x 16", a quarter inch thick, with a 1 1/2" radius on the corners, and weighs fifteen pounds.

Every one is seasoned by hand before it leaves Hanover, so it arrives ready to cook on. Shipping is free in the continental US. If it's unused and in its original packaging, you have 30 days from delivery to send it back, and we pay the return shipping. Once a steel has been heated it takes on color and can't go to the next customer as new, so we can't take it back at that point. If something's gone wrong, email us anyway. We'd rather hear about it.

It's fifteen pounds of American steel, with a limited lifetime warranty against defects. Serious Eats tested the field again in October 2026 and called it the best pizza steel you can buy. It's the best looking thing in my kitchen and it will outlive me.

What thickness and size do you need?

Thickness. A quarter inch is the sweet spot for most home ovens. It holds enough heat to bake four or five pizzas back to back and it still preheats in an hour. Go thicker and you store more heat, which matters if you're running pizzas all night, but it's heavier and it takes longer to come up to temperature. Go thinner than a quarter inch and you lose the thermal mass that makes the whole thing work.

Size. Measure your oven rack and subtract an inch on each side so air can move. Most home ovens take the 14" x 16" Original comfortably.

One or two. If you make a lot of pizza, a second Original on another rack will do more for you than one bigger steel. Two racks, two pizzas, and the oven recovers between rounds.

How to use one

• Put the steel on the upper rack of your oven.
• Preheat for 60 minutes at your oven's highest setting, on regular bake.
• Launch your pizza and bake 5 to 7 minutes.

For the full method, including the broiler, read How to Use a Baking Steel in a Home Oven.

It's not just for pizza

Bread, focaccia, English muffins and bagels all bake better on steel. A Baking Steel works on the stovetop or the grill too, for smash burgers, pancakes and grilled cheese.

If that's mostly what you're after, the griddles are built for it. Same low carbon steel, one more step: the cooking side is machined smooth, and there's a channel around the perimeter so the fat runs into it instead of off the edge and onto your burner.

Where the first one came from

In 2012 I was sitting in my office at my dad's steel shop, reading a Wall Street Journal article about Modernist Cuisine. What I took from it was that steel conducts heat better than stone.

I went out to the shop looking for a piece of metal I could bring home and fit in my oven. It happened to be a 3/8 inch piece of steel we used for a Caterpillar part. It wasn't pretty, but it was the right size. I made pizza on it that Sunday and I knew.

Every Baking Steel® is still made and shipped from that same shop in Massachusetts.

The whole story is here: Who Invented the Baking Steel.

Which one should you get?

Start with the Original. It's 14" x 16", a quarter inch thick, fifteen pounds, and it fits most home ovens. If you end up making a lot of pizza, a second Original on another rack will do more for you than one bigger steel.

You can see every size in our pizza steel collection.

Andris Lagsdin, inventor of the Baking Steel®