Pizza Oven Temperature and Cook Time Chart: The Sourced Reference

Deck means the cooking surface the pizza sits on. Dome or air means the space above it. Where a source does not distinguish the two, the cell says so rather than guessing. Hydration is baker's percentage.

Two things in that chart are worth reading twice. First, the two Neapolitan rows are the same style described by two governing documents that transpose the floor and dome figures. Second, look at the bake times: the spread from Neapolitan to Roman al taglio is 60 seconds to 25 minutes, a factor of 25. Style is not a topping choice. It is a completely different thermal event, and it is why an oven that is superb at one style can be genuinely bad at another.

To read any of these numbers on your own oven you need a surface thermometer, because no oven's built-in gauge measures the deck. That is the subject of a section below, and the ranked picks are in best infrared thermometer for pizza.

The chart is a reference. This is how to use it.

1. Decide by bake time, not by temperature. Temperature is the input; bake time is the thing you can actually observe and the thing that defines the style. If you want a 60 to 90 second Neapolitan you need a floor in the 700s or above and an oven that can hold it, which in practice means a live-fire or high-output gas oven from best outdoor pizza ovens or the dedicated shortlist in best pizza oven for Neapolitan pizza. If you want a 6 to 10 minute New York pie, you need 550°F held steady, which almost any oven can do and a home oven with a steel can very nearly do.

2. Match the floor to the style before you worry about the dome. The floor sets the bottom crust and the oven spring; the dome sets the top and the leoparding. Get the floor right first. This is also the practical resolution of the AVPN and EU conflict: both documents describe a floor and dome within about 55°C of each other at very high heat, and in a real oven you set the floor and the dome follows.

3. If your pizza burns on the bottom before the top is done, your floor is too hot relative to your dome, not too hot absolutely. The fix is to let the flame heat the air for a few minutes with the floor recovering, or to turn the pizza sooner. If the top is done and the base is pale, the floor is too cool, and no amount of extra flame will fix it because the flame heats the dome. This asymmetry is the single most common reason a new oven produces disappointing pizza and it is diagnosed in why is my pizza oven not getting hot enough.

4. For anything at or below 550°F, the stone or steel matters more than the oven. New York, Detroit, Roman, Sicilian, and Grandma all sit in the range a domestic oven reaches. What a domestic oven lacks is thermal mass in the floor, which is exactly what a baking steel or a cordierite stone supplies. Which of the two you want depends on the style: see pizza stone vs steel and best pizza stones and steels.

5. Pick the oven for the style you will actually cook most weeks. An electric countertop oven capped at 700 to 850°F is excellent for New York, Detroit, and frozen and cannot do a true 60 second Neapolitan; see best electric pizza ovens, best indoor pizza ovens, and best countertop pizza oven. A 950°F live-fire oven does Neapolitan beautifully and will incinerate a Detroit pan if you are not careful. The full field is ranked in best pizza ovens, and the style rivalry itself is covered in Neapolitan vs New York.

This is the finding, so here is all of it in one place.

The AVPN International Regulations (Disciplinare), 2024 edition specifies a base cooking temperature of approximately 380 to 430°C and a dome temperature of approximately 485°C, with a cooking time of 60 to 90 seconds and a maximum diameter of 35 cm. The dough is specified as 1 litre of water to 1,600 to 1,800 g of flour, which is 55.6% to 62.5% hydration in baker's terms, though the document itself never states a percentage. The finished pizza has a rim of 1 to 2 cm and a centre of 0.25 to 0.30 cm with a tolerance of 10%. The dough is described as needing to feel moist, non-sticky, soft and plastic.

Commission Regulation (EU) No 97/2010, which registered Pizza Napoletana as a Traditional Speciality Guaranteed, specifies a baking temperature on the cooking floor of the oven of approximately 485°C and a temperature at the oven dome of approximately 430°C, with a baking time of 60 to 90 seconds and a diameter not exceeding 35 cm. Its dough is 1 litre of water to 1.8 kg of W 220 to 380 flour, which is 55.6% hydration, with a flour absorption specification of 55 to 62. Its centre thickness is 0.4 cm with a 10% tolerance, which also differs from the AVPN's 0.25 to 0.30 cm. It additionally specifies internal temperatures during the bake: dough reaching 60 to 65°C, tomatoes 75 to 80°C, and mozzarella 65 to 70°C.

A third figure exists and should not be used. AVPN's own website recipe page states a temperature of 430 to 480°C, which matches neither of AVPN's own PDF specifications. If you are citing the AVPN, cite the Disciplinare.

One more sourcing detail for anyone quoting Fahrenheit: the 2024 Disciplinare contains no Fahrenheit figures at all. The 2022 edition does, and it is the edition that prints 485°C as 905°F. Any Fahrenheit number attributed to the 2024 document is somebody's conversion, including ours.

This is the section most temperature guides skip, and it is the one that explains almost every confused reading people get.

An infrared thermometer measures surface temperature only. ThermoWorks states plainly that infrared thermometers only measure surface temperatures and not internal temperature, and that they do not see through glass, liquids, or other transparent surfaces. Fluke says the same: they measure surface temperature, not internal temperature. Point one into your oven's mouth and it will read whatever solid surface is in its line of sight, which is usually the stone. It is not reading the air, and it cannot.

An oven's built-in gauge measures something else. Gozney's Arc manual describes its display as showing the temperature from within the oven, notably not the stone. A dial or probe mounted in the dome or door is sitting in hot air, and hot air in a pizza oven can be hundreds of degrees different from the floor beneath it. The two instruments are not in disagreement. They are measuring different things. Expecting them to match is like expecting a thermometer in your loft to match one in your oven.

Emissivity is the second reason readings differ, and it is the one that trips people up with a specific gun. An infrared thermometer infers temperature from emitted radiation, and how much a surface emits depends on the material. ThermoWorks gives a memorable example: aim an infrared gun at a stainless steel pot of boiling water and you might read closer to 100°F than the actual 212°F, because polished metal has very low emissivity. Fluke puts it the same way: low emissivity causes the thermometer to under-report the actual temperature.

Published emissivity values for oven floor materials, from a standard engineering table, show how wide the spread is:

We could not find a published emissivity value for cordierite, the material most pizza oven stones are actually made of, in any engineering table we could obtain, so we are not printing one. What we can tell you is that manufacturers have solved this for you: Ooni sells an infrared thermometer it describes as automatically calibrated for use with cordierite Ooni pizza stones, with adjustable emissivity and a 10:1 distance-to-spot ratio, and Gozney's own infrared thermometer recommends a 750 to 930°F target range for a stone floor. If you are using a general-purpose gun with a fixed emissivity setting on a cordierite stone, your reading has an unknown offset.

Distance-to-spot ratio is the third factor. ThermoWorks explains it cleanly: a 12:1 ratio measures the temperature of a 1 inch diameter circle from 12 inches away. Stand further back and the gun averages a much larger area, including the cooler edges of the stone, the oven wall, and anything visible through a gap. Fluke's guidance is to get close enough that the area being measured is smaller than or equal to your target. For reading the centre of a pizza stone through a small mouth, a high ratio matters. The Klein, Etekcity, Surpeer, and Fluke options are compared in our thermometer guide; the Surpeer IR-2732 is the high-ratio option and the Klein Tools IR1 the budget one.

Practical summary: trust the infrared reading on the stone for the floor, trust the built-in gauge for the air, and never expect them to agree. If you own an oven with no gauge at all, which is most portable gas ovens, the infrared reading on the stone is the only number you have, and it is the more useful of the two anyway.

Here is a gap worth knowing about before you chase a number on a box.

Almost no manufacturer says whether its headline maximum is a stone temperature or an air temperature. Ooni's Koda 16 and Karu 12 are both marketed at 950°F / 500°C with no surface specified. Gozney's Roccbox says in excess of 950°F, and the Arc and Arc XL spec rows say 950°F, again with no surface specified. The Ooni Volt 2 is 850°F, the Ninja Artisan 700°F, both unlabelled.

The one exception is Breville, whose Smart Oven Pizzaiolo manual separates deck temperature from top temperature in its manual mode table and lists the Neapolitan setting as 700 to 750°F deck for 2 minutes. That is the only mainstream manufacturer document we found that treats the two as distinct numbers, which is a real point in the Pizzaiolo's favour for anyone who cares about controlling both.

And the operating guidance runs lower than the marketing. Ooni markets the Koda 16 at 950°F, and Ooni's own getting-started guide for that oven tells you to make sure the stone gets back up to 715 to 850°F (380 to 450°C) between pizzas. Gozney markets the Arc at 950°F, and the Arc manual labels anything above 900°F as over temperature, too hot, while listing its own style targets:

Note how well those numbers agree with the independent sources in the chart at the top: Gozney's 600 to 700°F for New York sits inside the 500 to 600°F commercial deck range at the higher end, and its 800 to 900°F for Neapolitan sits inside the AVPN's floor and dome band. The manufacturers' own operating documents are more useful than their marketing, and they broadly agree with the style specifications. The 950°F figure is a peak capability, not a cooking target.

The practical takeaway is that if you are cross-shopping on maximum temperature alone, you are comparing numbers that the manufacturers themselves tell you not to cook at. See how hot does a pizza oven get for the capability question and what temperature for pizza for the plain-language version of this chart.

Hydration is the water in a dough as a percentage of the flour weight, always with flour at 100%. King Arthur's explanation of baker's math is the standard reference, and it notes that fats do not count toward hydration.

The pattern across the styles in the chart is clear and it maps directly onto bake time:

Hydration and oven temperature are inversely related, and the mechanism is evaporation time. Water has to leave the dough before the crust can set. In a 90 second Neapolitan bake there is almost no time for that, so the dough has to start relatively dry. In a 25 minute al taglio bake there is plenty of time, so the dough can start at 80% and still finish crisp. Putting an 80% hydration dough into a 900°F oven produces a pizza that is charred outside and raw inside; putting a 55% dough into a 450°F oven for 25 minutes produces a cracker.

The Roman al taglio disagreement is worth flagging rather than smoothing over. America's Test Kitchen states 82% explicitly, having settled on that figure deliberately. The Perfect Loaf uses 69% and par-bakes. The style's reputation for 80%-plus hydration is real but not universal, and we would not tell you al taglio simply is a two-stage bake, because respected sources split on that too.

Flour choice interacts with all of this, because a stronger flour absorbs more water at the same feel. The EU regulation specifies W 220 to 380 flour with an absorption of 55 to 62 for exactly this reason. Our best flour for pizza dough guide covers what W ratings mean in practice, and how to stretch pizza dough covers what a correctly hydrated dough should feel like.

There is no single frozen pizza temperature, and the assumption that there is causes a lot of mediocre frozen pizza. We pulled the numbers from the manufacturers' own product pages.

A 50°F spread across mainstream brands is not a rounding error, and the bake times differ by a factor of two. Read the box. Bare centre rack is the default across every brand we checked; a pan or sheet always adds time and is framed as producing a softer crust. Red Baron is the one brand that changes the temperature by cooking method as well as by crust.

On internal temperature: the brands themselves print different targets, with Tombstone specifying 165°F and Red Baron and Totino's specifying 160°F. The authoritative US government figure is 165°F (74°C), which FoodSafety.gov's safe minimum internal temperatures chart gives for leftovers and any reheated food, and which USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service repeats for reheating leftovers. No US government page names pizza specifically, so 165°F applies to your leftover pizza as a leftover rather than as pizza-specific guidance. FSIS also defines the danger zone as 40 to 140°F and advises never leaving food out of refrigeration for over 2 hours, or 1 hour above 90°F, which is the rule that actually matters at a pizza party.

A dedicated pizza oven handles frozen pizza well but usually needs to be run cooler than its natural setting, because a frozen base cannot absorb 900°F floor heat without burning before the middle thaws. That is covered in best pizza oven for frozen pizza, and reheating specifically in how to reheat pizza in the oven.

Naming the gaps is part of the point of a reference page. Here is everything we went looking for and did not get.

An emissivity value for cordierite. Cordierite is the material most pizza stones are made from, and it does not appear in any published emissivity table we could obtain. We printed values for fire brick, silica brick, refractory brick, and metals, and left cordierite out rather than borrow a nearby number.

Serious Eats figures, of any kind. The domain blocked every attempt to read it. Nothing from that source appears on this page, in either direction.

Modernist Pizza's New York temperature and hydration figures. Not available online. We are not attributing a New York number to Modernist.

Tom Lehmann's widely quoted New York figures. The sources that host them returned errors. The commonly repeated 500 to 515°F at four and a half minutes may well be right; we could not confirm it, so the New York row cites deck oven manuals instead.

Bake times from commercial deck oven manuals. Bakers Pride and Marsal both publish recommended temperatures and neither publishes a bake time. The New York bake time range comes from other sources.

Whether the Ninja Artisan's 700°F is a stone or an air figure. Not published.

DiGiorno's own safe internal temperature. Secondary sources claimed both 160°F and 165°F and neither figure appeared on a DiGiorno page. We cite the government figure instead.

Newman's Own baking instructions. The brand publishes none we could find, so it is absent from the frozen table rather than represented by a guess.

The claim that the Gozney Arc's built-in gauge reads the stone. This appears on review sites but not in Gozney's manual, which describes the display as showing the temperature from within the oven. We treated it as unverified.