Yep. Been making pizzas since the pandemic in large part due to how cheap they are for good food (and bonus points, they’re generally better for you if you make them yourself). That being said, people probably need a few basic things if you want to reliability make great pizza. First up (in my opinion), are better ingredients. Good flour, good olive oil, and good sauce are the most important things in my book, and they don’t add too much to the price.

Next is equipment, most important of which is a scale for weighing ingredients for the dough, then maybe a pizza steel (or baking stone, have used those plenty and you can occasionally find them cheap at Goodwill) and a peel (not strictly necessary in my opinion, but a very nice addition for ease of use).

I use this recipe for my dough, for my dough, with garlic powder and dried basil added and fermented for longer if anyone is interested in starting. I also recommend splurging for san maranzos on the sauce.

I definitely recommend a scale for any recipe using flour.

You can make due with premade sauce and crap olive oil until you can afford to upgrade.

I don’t have a pizza stone. Can’t afford it. I have a late cast iron pan I put on the bottom rack. This destroys the cure but it means any yard sale cast iron will work.

I don’t have a pizza stone. Can’t afford it. I have a large cast iron pan I put on the bottom rack. This destroys the cure but it means any yard sale cast iron will work.

I have a couple pizza stones, and they’re drastically overrated IME. The point is supposed to be about concentrating heat on the bread more than the toppings, and stone / ceramic just doesn’t hold heat as well as steel does. Last time I tried using a stone, I preheated the oven almost full blast for something like 45min, and the pizza still took a longass time to bake.

The point of an authentic brick pizza oven is to get the surfaces holding as much heat as possible so that the pizza only takes ~3min to bake, but that just wasn’t happening with these pizza stones. The point of ~3min bake time is that the bread gets fully cooked by the direct heat transfer, while the toppings remain very fresh due to only being exposed to heat in the air.

When I researched, I found that “pizza steels” work vastly better. Evidently, you get one sized to your oven so as to leave a margin around the rack area so that heat exchanges well from top to bottom. Particularly if you only have heating elements on the top or bottom. An alternative I also read about is getting yourself firebrick (which has higher heat resistance than regular brick) and layer that across your rack, and it should also store up a lot of heat.

Bottom line, I suspect that you’re in great shape using cast iron, etc and leaving pizza stones to the frou-frous.

Yeah, steels are definitely better (got a cheap one at aldi a few months ago for $20), but I used stones for years before I got the steel and they do work. But in my experience stones are what I would consider the basic option, as you can pull it out and get a decent bottom, but steels are definitely better, even cheap ones giving a crisp bottom quickly. However, I recommended the stones mostly because there will be someone who will think a baking sheet is fine, and those generally aren’t (too low thermal mass, occasionally warp in the amount of heat that you will be cooking a pizza at, etc), whereas I’ve seen decent baking stones at the same price or lower than a baking sheet (seen at ~$5 a few times at aldi).