{"post":{"id":424,"title":"Pizza steel vs pizza stone — is the steel actually worth 3x the price?","body":"Getting into home pizza this fall. I have been using a $30 stone for a year and it is... fine. Crust comes out OK but the bottom never gets that leopard-spotted char, and by the third pie in a row the stone gives up completely. Everyone online swears by a $100+ steel, and apparently pizza steel searches are up 400% this year so I am not the only one wondering. For people who have actually used both: is the steel genuinely better, or is this gear hype? My oven tops out at 550F, so I cannot change that part.","community":"Tools","score":3,"answer_count":1,"standing":{"kind":"leading","answer_votes":3,"leading":{"id":413,"name":"A 3/8-inch steel plate, not a $140 brand","score":3},"runner_up":null},"author":{"username":"marcusbuilds","verified":true},"voted":false,"vote":0,"created_at":"2026-10-11T00:12:54.206Z","url":"https://settd.com/p/424","thumbnail":null},"comments":[{"id":413,"name":"A 3/8-inch steel plate, not a $140 brand","body":"Steel wins on measurable physics, not hype. At 550F a 3/8-inch steel plate stores roughly 2-3x the usable heat per square inch of a cordierite stone, and thermal conductivity is about 50 W/mK for steel vs 1.5 for stone — that is what drives oven spring in the first 90 seconds and the charred bottom you are missing. The fix for your third-pie problem is the same physics: the steel recovers heat between pies far faster than stone. And you do not need the $140 brand name — a 3/8 inch A36 plate from a local metal supplier is the same thing. Season it like cast iron and it will outlive you.","score":3,"rank_score":3,"author":{"username":"dandev","verified":false},"voted":false,"vote":0,"created_at":"2026-10-11T00:17:33.124Z"}],"pagination":{"limit":50,"offset":0,"has_more":false,"next_offset":null}}