The two things in life I know best are steel and pizza.
My dad’s a steel man. My brother’s a steel man. And I suppose somewhere deep inside, I’m a steel man too. My family owns the Stoughton Steel Company in the South Shore of Boston, where we’ve made industrial steel products for over forty years.
But when I was young, I didn’t want much to do with the family business. I left to see the world; I became a tennis instructor and held every service job imaginable. Along the way I learned that I loved working in restaurant kitchens. There’s something about the energy, the hustle, and, of course, the food.
In my twenties I landed a job in Boston slinging pizza at Figs, celebrated chef Todd English’s restaurant. Todd was at the leading edge of the artisanal-pizza movement; he sourced local ingredients and championed the now-trendy, airy thin-crust pizza long before anyone used the phrase farm to table. My time at Figs gave me an education that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else.
I already liked pizza, but after working for Todd, I lived for it. There’s the quiet, meditative task of prepping: the feel of dough in your hands, the comforting repetition of chopping and stirring. There’s the sweet aroma of rising dough and the acidic zing of fresh tomato sauce. And the most fulfilling part of making pizza is the sense of connection and creativity that comes with the process. It’s even better when it’s a family, friend, or party activity.
But although homemade pizza is fun to make, the pie never quite measures up to the kind with the perfectly crisp crust you get straight out of a restaurant’s screaming-hot brick oven. For years, I—and every serious home cook I knew—used a baking stone to make pizza in the kitchen oven, assuming it was the best way to approximate the charred, blistered pizza-oven crusts. Even with my training, though, I couldn’t make restaurant-quality pizza that way.
I transitioned from Todd’s kitchen to his management team, but after a few years, I was burned out by the hectic pace and unforgiving hours. My dad asked if I’d come back to the family business, and I said yes. I gave it my all—but part of me dreamed about starting a new business, one related to food.
One day at work, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine. In that hallowed encyclopedia of food science, the author made a keen observation about the physics of baking. He said, essentially, “The best conductor for creating a perfect pizza crust is not stone, but steel.” If I were anyone else, I might have thought about it for a second, nodded, and then moved on with my life. But I’m not anyone else; I’m a steel man with a passion for pizza. This felt like fate.
I sprinted into the plant and hunted for the thinnest piece of metal available. I found a rusty scrap that had once been a Caterpillar part. It wasn’t pretty, but it looked like just the right size for my experiment.
I brought it home and told my wife it was my new pizza stone, and she looked at me like I was crazy. But that first pizza I made was a revelation; it was done in half the time it took on my traditional pizza stone, and the perfect, airy crispness of the crust brought me back to the days of working with a 900-degree wood-fired oven. Encouraged by my first test, I cautiously mentioned my experiment to my brother and father, who ran Stoughton Steel, and gently suggested it could be a new product for us. Their reaction was… skeptical. The factory produced stabilizer pads for backhoes, not kitchenware. How on earth were a bunch of steel guys going to bring a home-pizza product to market?
I didn’t trust my instincts, so I decided to shelve the project. Still, the idea stuck with me. I woke up every morning for six months thinking about the pizza steel. Then one day I found the confidence to take the leap and do everything I could to bring the product to life. I had been working hard for the past fifteen years, but I hadn’t been pursuing my passion. I had two young boys, and I thought of the example I was setting for them. Sure, I was in a comfortable spot in my career, but comfort is not the same thing as fulfillment. I wanted to show them you can get up every day and do what you love.
I already knew the steel worked. I brought up my idea for a steel baking surface with my father and brother again, less cautiously now, and they began to come around. Perhaps it was my confidence in the product, or maybe they were convinced by the amazing pizzas I was making. I refined the prototype and they started to see how my passion project could become a source of income.
Launching a new product isn’t as simple as putting an item in a box with a logo and shipping it out. In developing the steel, I had to consider its size, shape, and weight; what would work without being too cumbersome? I obsessively measured the temperatures and sizes of various ovens (probably making myself a person of interest at Home Depot in the process). I practically wore ruts in the pavement between our production facility and my parents’ kitchen as I tried out each new version and developed a seasoning process to make the steel food-safe.
The more I tested the steel, the more versatile I realized it was. It could be used for roasting meat and vegetables and baking bread; it could even be frozen and used to make slab-style ice cream creations. But what would we call it? I have my brilliant wife to thank for the name: Baking Steel. It was perfect—like the product, the name was basic, simple, and about more than just pizza.
In the beginning, I was so focused on making the steel work that I didn’t have any idea how many I might sell. Selling even one seemed like a good place to start. I’d seen other small businesses find success with crowdfunding platforms, and I decided that was what we needed to do to prove that the steel was a viable product. I set a modest goal on Kickstarter of three thousand dollars, just enough to cover the first production run.
I knew the Baking Steel made the best home-oven pizza I’d ever tasted, and I had the support of my friends and family, but would anyone else care? After all, nearly two-thirds of Kickstarter projects never get fully funded.
As soon as the site went live, I reached out to everyone I’d ever talked to, dated, or bought a latte from. A day later, we made our goal. It was really happening!
Before the campaign closed, something incredible happened. J. Kenji López-Alt, the managing culinary director of the popular food website Serious Eats, e-mailed to ask if he could try one out. A couple of days later he posted a review stating that the Baking Steel blew his favorite pizza stone out of the water. Things snowballed and the number of backers doubled.
Our first Baking Steel shipped in 2014. Since then, we’ve brought restaurant-quality baking projects to thousands of homes. I’ve opened a test kitchen near my Boston-area home, and I work with an amazing chef, Craig Hastings, to develop recipes. The Baking Steel has inspired a new generation of pizza makers. And with our new griddle-surface Baking Steel, we’ve brought the cooking power of steel to a wider range of foods. Baking Steel enthusiasts are always dreaming up new recipes, from whoopie pies to roasted vegetables to perfect steaks to, yes, even English muffins, and some of them kindly provided recipes for this book. (If you come up with a new Baking Steel recipe, share it with me at andris@bakingsteel.com.)
It’s amazing what a piece of steel has done for my life. Let me show you what it can do in your kitchen.