So, my adventures in optimizing the reasonably quick pepperoni pizza made at home in a newish convection oven has led to some observations.
1) A bog standard benriner mandolin works fine for pepperoni slicing if you don't buy pre-sliced, just pop that pep in the freezer for a bit before cutting and make sure to find the "stable" side of the mandolin or you'll get wonky slices. You'll know, you'll see it flex more on one side than the other as you cut.
2) Get your mozz & other cheeses you plan to use (except for cheeses you put on last like parm) and buzz em up in a food processor
with a standard blade (not the shredder blade counterintuitively) until it's all roughly even sized bits (I shoot for 1/8th inch bits on average), then mix 'em together in a big ziploc, gently get most of the air out, and keep it in the freezer. I'd suggest doing each cheese separately as they might behave differently in the food processor. Keeps for quite a while (longer than incrementally using cheese kept in the fridge) and gets you that "frozen cheese" trick used to keep the cheese from getting too overdone in a standard oven. The standard blade also seems to create shapes which become masses which are easier to break up into small pieces again once it gets frozen, whereas the shredder created much harder to break apart masses after freezing. Not all cheeses may be amenable to this but for mozz and prov it works great.
3) One of those pizza disks from Lloyd that looks a bit like a massive flat salt-shaker top works pretty well if you plop that on one of the racks mid-oven and then put a same size or larger pan below it to catch droppings from the pizza (cover with foil for easy cleanup),
assuming you're using the oven in a convection mode. I'm not making massive pizzas so you can kind of fudge past the need for a pizza steel that needs a lot of heat-up which saves some time. Just put the disk in a bit before you want to pizza to start but you don't need to pre-heat it for very long: not much mass so it heats up pretty quick but it also allows the hot air access to the bottom of the pizza.
4) Get a short handled peel it makes everything so much easier.
5) Try the air-fry mode on the oven if it comes with one, even if you preheat in a more standard convection mode. I've been having the best luck going convection roast to get it all to 500 and then swapping to air-fry at 500 to actually cook the pizza. Convection bake or roast the entire time seems to tend towards something getting too done while the rest isn't quite there whereas the air-fry I've been getting pretty decent done-ness. Still not on the level of a specialized oven but it's a hell of a lot better than you'd think if you watch it like a hawk.
6) Play around with the dried veggies and mushrooms from asian markets, if you slice things thin (like matchsticks) they will re-hydrate while cooking if you put them on after sauce but before cheese. So far I've tried mushrooms to good effect, the only thing is you miss the texture, but you sure as hell get the flavor.
7) I've moved away from rolling pin flattening my dough since I can get a much better bake with the improved air-fry switch tech and just stretching the dough into a disk...ish (I'd hestiate to call it tossing though it gets to the same place). Definitely makes for a better pizza and it gets all puffy on the crust like it should.
