
Simply the best baking surface available for your oven or grill. Nickel-free stainless steel is bonded to hand-cast aluminum, giving you a hard cooking surface with unmatched heat capacity. The BakePlate cooking surface is 16" by 16", with trimmed corners. It's big enough for a 15" pizza, a 7 lb. miche, or two batards. The weight, at 18 lbs., is comparable to a 1/4" thick steel plate, but the BakePlate holds more heat and is much easier to handle. The raised cooking surface allows you to easily grip the edges on all four sides (please don't try to move it while it's hot). The BakePlate holds more heat than 5/8" thick Cordierite baking stone and twice the heat of a 1/4" steel plate.
We start with aluminum. It's twice the cost of steel or cast iron, but we use it because, per pound, it holds close to twice the heat of steel or cast iron. A steel plate holding the same heat as a BakePlate or PizzaPlate would weigh almost twice as much. Instead of using multiple stones or steels to get a perfect crust, bake multiple perfect crusts on one BakePlate.
The BakePlate isn’t just a flat plate. An array of cross-shaped heat fins double the surface area on the bottom of the BakePlate. The increased surface area lets more heat into the BakePlate, so it preheats and reheats faster. A steel plate takes an hour to preheat. A BakePlate takes only fifteen minutes longer, but holds twice as much heat.
The heat fins also raise the cooking surface of the BakePlate off the oven rack, shelf or counter. You can easily lift it from all sides. It weighs almost 18 pounds, but it’s much easier to handle than a stone or steel plate.
Aluminum is great for holding and moving heat, but it’s not a great baking surface. It’s too soft to hold up to a metal pizza peel, gets a little sticky at high temperatures and tends to scorch instead of brown. We looked at many options before deciding on Series 400 stainless steel. Known for its resistance to high-heat oxidation, it's melted then sprayed onto the cast aluminum, leaving a hard, durable surface that is perfect for baking.
We took that hard, durable surface and went one step further. We test-baked over 100 pizzas to create the perfect baking surface for your home oven. Our SprayBrick surface gives you the crust you could only get in a brick oven. On multiple pizzas.
We pre-heated a 1/4" steel plate, a BakePlate and a popular $500 backyard propane pizza oven, then baked 4 pizzas in 30 minutes on each. The same dough and toppings were used on all 12 pizzas. After 1 or 2 pizzas, only the BakePlate made consistent, crisp on the bottom crusts. Beating the steel plate wasn't a surprise, the BakePlate holds twice the amount of heat and has twice the bottom surface area absorbing more heat. The propane pizza oven was the surprise disappointment. Tremendous top heat, even on low we had to watch closely or the top of the crust would catch fire. But underneath all that top heat is the same baking stone that doesn't make great crust in a home oven. There's just not enough bottom heat to match the top heat.