Stop Burning Your Crusts: The Secret to Better Pizza Heat
If you’ve ever run a high-volume pizza oven, you know the struggle. One second your crust is perfectly charred, and the next, it’s a blackened mess. The problem is usually “thermal inertia.” That’s just a fancy way of saying your heating elements are too heavy. They hold onto heat for way too long. Even after your controller tells the power to cut off, those heavy elements keep pumping out heat. It’s like trying to stop a freight train—it doesn’t just stop the moment you hit the brakes. That’s why we switched to quartz-halogen infrared lamps. They don’t linger. They hit their temperature almost instantly, and more importantly, they cool down just as fast. Speed and Power We built these lamps to react in seconds. Because the filament sits inside a lightweight quartz envelope, there isn’t much mass to heat up. You get a direct blast of heat straight onto the food. When your controller shuts things off, the heat stops. Period. This lets you keep your temperature in a very tight window, so every pizza comes out the same. One quick tip: if you’re running a high-wattage setup, keep your reflectors clean. If they’re dirty, the heat bounces back into the lamp ends and kills them way faster than they should die. Getting Them Installed Most of our lamps use standard R7s or SK15 connectors, so they usually just slide right into most commercial ovens. We use high-purity quartz so the tubes don’t warp when they’re heating up and cooling down a hundred times a day. Just do me a favor: check your voltage before you plug them in. If the voltage is off, the lamp will either be too weak or it’ll burn out before you can even finish your first shift. The Catch Here is the trade-off. These lamps give you incredible precision, but they’re fragile. They aren’t like metal coils. If you whack a quartz tube with a tool or splash cold water on it while cleaning, it’ll crack. When you handle them, stick to the ends. And please, don’t touch the glass with your bare hands. The oils from your skin create little hot spots on the glass, and that’s a one-way ticket to a broken tube.