Why Is My Pizza Burnt on the Bottom? (And Why the Reverse Happens Too)

Everything on this page follows from one fact. The floor cooks the base by conduction and the dome cooks the top by radiation, and they are independent. Conduction is contact: cold wet dough touches hot stone, and heat pours directly into the base at a rate set by how hot that stone is and how much thermal mass sits behind it. Radiation is line of sight: the hot dome and the flame throw infrared energy downward onto the cheese, the sauce and the rim, with no contact required. A finished pizza is the moment those two processes cross the finish line together.

Once you see it that way, the two failures stop being mysterious and start being arithmetic. If conduction is running faster than radiation, the base is done before the top is, and by the time the top catches up the base is carbon. If radiation is running faster than conduction, the cheese blisters and the rim chars while the base is still pale and floppy. There is no third option, which is why this page has exactly two halves. You are never diagnosing "the oven"; you are diagnosing the ratio between two numbers.

The professional documents make the same point implicitly, and they make it by disagreeing with each other. Commission Regulation (EU) No 97/2010, the legal text behind Pizza Napoletana as a Traditional Speciality Guaranteed, specifies a cooking floor of 485°C under an oven dome of 430°C. The AVPN Disciplinare, 2024 edition, specifies a cooking surface of 380 to 430°C under a dome of 485°C, which is the exact reverse ordering. Two respected authorities, both describing the same pizza, transpose which surface should be hotter. We are not going to relitigate that here; it is documented in full on our pizza oven temperature chart. What matters for you is the implication: even the experts treat the floor and the dome as two separate dials, and so should you.

This is the common one, and it usually means you are cooking a slower style on a faster floor. Gozney publishes 600 to 700°F for New York style and 800 to 900°F for Neapolitan, and that gap is not a rounding error, it is the difference between a bake that survives 4 to 12 minutes and a bake that is over in 60 to 90 seconds. Put a New York pizza, which needs several minutes for its thicker base and heavier topping load to cook through, onto a floor set up for Neapolitan, and the base will be black long before the interior is done. That is not a technique failure. That is a mismatch between the style and the deck, and the answer is to bring the floor down to where the style lives.

The corrections, in the order you should try them. Turn the flame down and wait. This is the fix people skip, because dropping the burner feels like it should work instantly and it does not. The stone has already absorbed heat; it now has to shed some, and that takes minutes, not seconds. Turn it down, leave the dome lit so the ceiling stays hot, and re-measure before you launch. Move the pizza to a cooler part of the floor. Compact ovens are asymmetric by design, and the region directly over or beside the burner runs hotter than the rest. If the scorch mark on your base is always in the same place, that is a map of your oven, not a mystery. Dome the pizza, which gets its own section below. And let the stone recover between pizzas, because a deck that has been fed by a burner for twenty minutes without a cold pizza landing on it can drift above where you set it.

One more cause worth naming, because it looks like a burnt base and is not. If the underside is speckled with black bitter grit rather than evenly dark, that is scorched semolina or flour on the stone, not an overcooked crust. It tastes acrid and it transfers to every subsequent pizza. Brush it off with a brush and scraper between pizzas and the bitterness goes away without touching your temperatures at all. We cover that failure and its relatives in why does my pizza taste smoky.

The mirror image is less discussed and more frustrating, because the instinct it triggers is exactly wrong. You see a blistered, blackening top and you reach for the flame control. Do not. A pale base under a charred top is almost always a preheat problem, and turning the flame down makes it worse, because the flame is also what is charging the stone. You are treating the symptom and starving the cure.

What has actually happened is that the chamber air and the dome came up fast, as they always do, while the stone underneath, which has real thermal mass and heats slowly, is still charging. Launch into that state and radiation is at full strength while conduction is at half. Notice how Ooni frames its own Koda 16 instruction: preheat the stone to 715 to 850°F (380 to 450°C). Not the air. The stone. Manufacturers write the target that way precisely because they know owners judge readiness by how the flame looks.

The three corrections here are patience, discipline and measurement. Preheat the stone longer, which is free and works, and which our heat up timing guide puts realistic numbers around by fuel type. Stop opening the door, because every opening dumps chamber heat that the stone then has to help replace, and the stone is the slow part of the system. Drop the flame only after the floor is up, not before. If your top is charring on an already hot floor, then and only then is a lower flame the right lever, and even then doming is usually the better answer. If the base is not merely pale but genuinely wet, the failure has crossed into a different family, covered in why is my pizza soggy in the middle.

You cannot balance two numbers if you only ever see one of them, and the one most people see is the wrong one. A built-in dial typically reports chamber or shell temperature, which moves fast, looks reassuring, and tells you almost nothing about what the base of your pizza is about to touch. The floor is the number that decides whether you get a burnt base, and the only practical way to know it is to point an infrared thermometer at the centre of the stone before you launch. A budget unit such as the Etekcity Lasergrip 774 does the job as well as anything for this purpose; our full picks are in the best infrared thermometer for pizza.

Then compare that reading to your style rather than to your oven's ceiling. Ooni's Koda 16 Getting Started page targets a stone of 715 to 850°F (380 to 450°C) and says a Neapolitan style pizza "will be ready in under 2 minutes" at that floor. Gozney publishes 600 to 700°F for New York and 800 to 900°F for Neapolitan, and its Arc manual labels anything above 900°F as over temperature. That last point deserves emphasis, because both Ooni and Gozney market roughly 950°F as a peak capability, and owners routinely read that number as a cooking target. It is not. It is a ceiling. Cooking a pizza on a floor above the manufacturer's own stated range is a burnt base with extra steps.

This is the technique that makes the burnt base problem manageable in real time, and it is startlingly simple. Slide a turning peel under the pizza, lift it off the stone, and hold it up toward the dome for a few seconds. The moment the pizza leaves the floor, conduction stops dead: no contact, no heat into the base. Radiation continues at full strength onto the top. You have unilaterally paused one of the two cooking processes while the other runs, which is exactly the correction a raw top over a nearly done base requires.

Do it with a small round turning peel, not with your launching peel. A big flat launch paddle is clumsy in a hot chamber and cannot support a pizza near the ceiling with any control. Any decent small round peel works; the Chef Pomodoro turning peel is a common alternative to Ooni's. The full mechanics of the movement, including how to avoid tearing the pizza while it is still soft, are in how to turn a pizza, and our peel picks are in the best pizza peels.

Two cautions. Doming works on fast bakes and is largely irrelevant on slow ones: at a 4 to 12 minute New York bake there is time for the top to catch up on its own, and lifting the pizza mostly just cools it. And doming is a rescue, not a routine. If you need it on every pizza, your floor to dome ratio is wrong at the source and you should fix the preheat or the flame rather than performing surgery on every pie.

A lot of bad advice about burnt bases comes from applying Neapolitan instincts to a New York pizza or the reverse, so it is worth being blunt about how different the two bakes are. Both the EU regulation and the AVPN Disciplinare specify a Neapolitan bake of 60 to 90 seconds. New York style, by the figures published on our temperature chart, bakes at 500 to 600°F for 4 to 12 minutes, and commercial deck oven manuals from Bakers Pride specify at least 550°F for baking directly on the deck. That is not a small adjustment. It is a bake that runs somewhere between three and twelve times longer.

The consequence for burnt bases is direct. In 90 seconds, the base simply does not have time to overcook unless the floor is genuinely extreme, which is why Neapolitan tolerates and requires a very hot deck. Over 4 to 12 minutes, the base has enormous time to keep absorbing heat, which is why the same floor that produces a perfect 90 second Neapolitan produces a charcoal disc at minute six. Longer bakes want cooler floors. That is the entire rule. The EU regulation also notes that a correctly baked Neapolitan reaches 60 to 65°C internally, which is a reminder that the target is a cooked interior, not a colour on the outside.

If you are switching between styles, switch your floor target with them and give the stone time to move. A deck cannot go from 850°F to 650°F because you decided to make a different pizza; it needs the flame turned down and real minutes to shed. The style differences in dough, hydration and topping load are laid out in Neapolitan vs New York pizza.

The last cause is the one that catches people on pizza four rather than pizza one, and it runs in both directions, which is why it belongs on a page about balance. Every cold pizza you launch pulls heat out of the stone directly beneath it. Launch three in quick succession into the same spot and the floor there can be well below where you started, giving you the pale base and charred top failure on a night that began perfectly. Ooni addresses this directly for the Koda 16: between pizzas, make sure the stone gets back up to 715 to 850°F (380 to 450°C) before launching again.

The reverse also happens, and it surprises people. If you have the burner running hard and you take a long break between pizzas, or you keep the flame high while chatting, the deck keeps absorbing heat with nothing drawing it out. The next pizza lands on a floor considerably hotter than the one that worked twenty minutes ago, and burns. In both directions the remedy is identical and takes two seconds: re-measure the floor between pizzas instead of assuming the number held.

How much recovery time you actually need depends on the mass of your stone and your fuel, and it is the single biggest determinant of how many pizzas an evening can produce without a drop in quality. We work through the pacing in cooking multiple pizzas back to back, and the reason the same deck is not uniform from front to back in pizza oven hot spots. Both are worth reading before you host.