Last night I was reading an
article by Kenji at Serious Eats about the baking steel. He focuses on volumetric heat capacity rather than thermal conductivity. For example, he writes that boiling water burns you but oven air does not because of the water's higher volumetric heat capacity, which was surprising to me. Generally I trust Kenji, but I'm definitely going to look this one up; I'm pretty sure I've heard the opposite elsewhere (e.g. Dave Arnold's talk at the Harvard food science lectures).
Anyway, thinking about pizza and thermal properties made me wonder: why not use aluminum instead of steel for a pizza baking surface? Yes, its volumetric heat capacity is lower (by a factor of 2-3, I believe), but its thermal conductivity is higher (according to
this, by a factor of 4-20). Since even a relatively small block of aluminum (say 50cm x 50cm x 1cm) in a hot oven contains many times the heat energy needed to cook a pizza, shouldn't we be more concerned about conductivity than energy content? The thought being that we're not worried about the metal having enough energy to cook the pizza (steel or aluminum both will several times over) but rather how fast that energy can transfer to the pizza.
