Can Frigidaire's New Stone-Baked Pizza Mode Deliver Artisanal Pies?
In our labs, this superhot feature elevated some parts of the pizza-making process, but it still took skill to make a pie worthy of a chef's kiss
Do you really love pizza? If the answer is yes, you might seriously consider buying a range or wall oven with Frigidaire’s new hotter-than-hot stone-baked pizza mode.
We recently gave it a try in our labs.
Mastering the Slide
In our kitchen lab one morning, Paul and I prepared 20 pizzas for about a dozen colleagues, using fresh dough from a local Whole Foods, which sources it from a local pizza parlor. We stretched the dough on a floured counter with our fingers and sometimes with a rolling pin, and then transferred it to the range’s wooden pizza peel, treated with cornmeal to keep the pies from sticking.
We had already moved the rack inside the range to Position 7, conveniently labeled near the top of the oven, put the stainless steel shield on top of the rack, and placed the pizza stone atop the metal shield. After that, we just pressed a button on the range’s touchscreen to launch the 30-minute preheating cycle, which is about twice as long as it takes to heat up a conventional oven.
So far so good.
Getting a pizza into the oven, however, required some finesse. We opened that 750º F oven, placed the leading edge of the peel toward the back of the stone, and then yanked the peel forcefully so that the pizza dropped to the stone.
The cornmeal grains supported the process by acting like microscopic ball bearings that allowed the pizza dough to slide off the peel’s wooden surface.
Paul managed to get all the pies off the peel cleanly, but he’s a veteran. You might need a little practice—and a little patience. He recalled mishaps during his outdoor pizza oven testing days, where a pie didn’t slide off cleanly and instead collected in a gloppy mess at one end of the hot stone. He had to wait until the disaster pie was mostly cooked before he could clean off the stone. All of which threw a large monkey wrench into the pizza production for his hungry family.
On this day, we found that once you’ve mastered the art of sliding the pizza off the peel, it isn’t all that hard to produce a perfectly adequate pizza. But getting a pie that merits a chef’s kiss requires some experimentation with not only the oven’s settings but with the toppings.
The very first pizza we made was a mind-bending failure: The cheese was almost blackened, and the crust was underdone. How could that be? The culprit seemed to be the shredded Parmesan cheese we sprinkled on top of the mozzarella for flavor. Switching to a mootz-only topping yielded a pie with cheese that was still overdone—browned rather than blackened.
At the request of co-workers, we then added some vegetable toppings, including mushrooms and red onions. And lo and behold, the moisture in the veggies kept the cheese from browning too much. If that’s not your thing, you might also try adjusting the amount of sauce and cheese—less is often more when it comes to pizza—or maybe sprinkling a tiny bit of water on top of the cheese just before baking.
Once we had the top of the pizza nailed, we shifted our attention to the crust. Our first pies were more than edible, but they were also very much on the chewy side.
It turns out the oven’s 2-minute pizza cycle wasn’t quite long enough. Paul simply added 30 seconds to the cook time, and all was good.
Bottom line: By removing the Parmesan, adding the veggies, and increasing the cook time, we were able to nail a near-perfect level of doneness within our first five tries. Your mileage may vary.
Great Pies in 2 to 3 Minutes
Despite the crazy-hot temperature setting, the Frigidaire range proved surprisingly user-friendly. Even after it had been through the full 30-minute preheat cycle and hovered at that 750º F peak temperature for more than an hour, the door, the handle, and all the other outside surfaces remained merely warm to the touch. With the door open, the oven still didn’t feel that much hotter than an oven at the more familiar 500º F setting.
That said, some of the range’s features did cramp our style. For example, there isn’t a way to select a temperature between the 750º F pizza setting and the peak 500º F baking and roasting settings. And much to our chagrin, when we tried to lower the temp, the oven restarted that whole 30-minute preheating cycle, even though the heat barely had time to drop before we quickly turned it back up. We were still able to cook pies, but we had to time them manually with a smartphone.
We also experienced a few flare-ups, where something—usually a dab of grease from a slice of pepperoni or a small bit of crust—caught fire briefly as we took a pizza out of the oven. The directions say to just close the oven door if this occurs, and that’s just what we did. It happened only a couple of times and for only a couple of seconds. Not a big deal as long as you can resist the urge to freak out and reach for the fire extinguisher.
It’s also worth noting that the range doesn’t come with printed directions, so you may want to print pages from the online instructions before you start cooking.
How were the pies? In short, they were a hit. They definitely leaned toward the artisanal pizza aesthetic, with a crispy exterior charred in spots and a slightly chewy interior. They were quite different from, say, the very thin New Jersey bar pies I personally favor. And when we tried to bake a Jersey-style version, it totally backfired: The dough pulled to the center and left us with a thick, blobby mutant pie that resembled a Panera-style bread bowl. We may have put too much cornmeal on the peel, hoping to coax the thin pie off cleanly. We suspect that the problem might be fixed with a little experimentation—like covering the peel with flour instead.
For the most part, our impressions of the pizza oven were positive. We were able to produce high-quality pies in short order. When the pizzas were prepped, the Frigidaire’s super-quick cooking time allowed us to finish three of them—enough for an entire family—in less than 15 minutes. In this regard, the very hot pizza oven represented a huge improvement over outdoor ovens, where Hope found it very hard to hit the right temperature and keep it locked in throughout the cooking process.
If you’re ready to turn your kitchen into a makeshift pizzeria, you’ll be happy to know that the range’s pizza feature is available for only a small premium. The GCFI3070BF currently sells for $1,499 on Amazon (though some other retailers price it at almost $1,700). Frigidaire’s GCFI3060BF, essentially the same model without the pizza kit and super-hot oven setting, retails for $1,482.
Frigidaire also offers two other high-heat ranges with the pizza stone feature: the GCFG3070BF, which has a gas cooktop, and the GCFE3070BF, which sports a smoothtop electric cooktop. The company also makes three wall ovens: a single, a double, and a combo model with a microwave—each with the high-heat pizza function as well as the pizza stone and other accessories. Our testers expect the pizza ovens in all these models to perform similarly to the GCFI3070BF.
BEST TIME TO BUY:
