Have you ever tried your hand at making pizzas at home? Chances are you liked the experiment but not the final product. Homemade pizzas are notorious for lacking the crackly crust and crispy restaurant-quality sear.

Traditionally, pizzas were made in a wood-fired oven in the backyard. However, the time, effort, space and cost required for making pizza in a wood-fired oven is simply not feasible for most people these days. You can use a pizza stone but don’t expect the same restaurant-quality crust. A better tool for cooking pizza at home is a pizza steel, AKA, a baking steel. Baking steel pizza is crispier and can be made at home within minutes.

What is a pizza steel?

As the term suggests, a pizza steel is a pizza cooking tool made from steel. The material makes it more efficient than a pizza stone in conducting heat to the pizza crust. Pizza stones are made of ceramic, cordierite or clay, which is why they cannot transfer heat as efficiently as baking steels. While stone preserves heat, steel quickly absorbs and then rereleases the heat back into the dough. In fact, pizza steels can transfer heat 20 times faster than pizza stones, a quality that allows them to cook baking steel pizza faster and at higher temperatures. They also outperform pizza stones at absorbing and retaining heat.

In addition to their great heat conducting abilities, here are three other reasons you should invest in a pizza baking steel:

1. Durability

Baking steels are made from a solid piece of steel, which means they won’t break or crack. Even if you expose them to very high or low temperatures or a rapid temperature change, they will remain intact. In comparison, pizza stones are quite fragile and will easily break or crack in high temperatures. Also, pizza stones are prone to thermal shock, which means you should be careful not to heat them up or cool them down too quickly otherwise, the rapid thermal shock could break the stone. If you accidentally drop your pizza stone, it will break, while a pizza steel does not usually break when dropped.

2. Cooks pizzas faster

As mentioned earlier, pizza steels are about 20 times more conductive than pizza stones. As a result, you can expect them to cook pizzas faster and create a crispier crust. While pizza stones take more than 20minutes to cook a pizza, good-quality baking steels won’t take more than 5minutes. This means you can cook pizzas for a party or a large group without spending all night in the kitchen.

3. Helps cook more pizzas at once