Screens and perforated pans exist to solve a handling problem. Understanding that is the whole answer, because they are worse than a stone at everything else.
By Scooter M./Published September 1, 2026
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They are answers to different questions, and most of the confusion comes from comparing them as if they were interchangeable.
A stone or steel answers "how do I get more heat into the base". A screen answers "how do I get the pizza into the oven without a peel and without a disaster". A perforated pan answers the same question as a screen, slightly more rigidly and with slightly more contact.
A screen is an open mesh, so the base touches metal only along the wires. Whatever fraction of the base is actually in contact is the fraction that gets conductive heat; the rest is heated by air and radiation from below, which is far slower.
Which is not to say it produces a bad pizza. It produces a different pizza: dry and evenly crisp rather than blistered and spotted, because the base dries in hot air rather than searing against a hot solid. That is exactly the texture a lot of American takeaway pizza has, and it is not an accident - screens are what most pizzerias use for exactly that style, at exactly that speed, in exactly that kind of deck oven.
Contact area
The single variable that separates a screen, a perforated pan and a solid surface
Not temperature, not material. A screen touches the base along wires, a perforated pan along everything except the holes, and a stone or steel along all of it.
| Bottom crust | Ease of launch | Preheat needed | Best for | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steel | Best | Needs a peel | 25-30 min | Thin, blistered, fast bakes |
| Stone | Very good | Needs a peel | 25 min | Pizza and bread both |
| Perforated pan | Fair | Easy | None required | Even, dry crispness without a peel |
| Screen | Fair, and evenly so | Easiest | None required | Takeaway-style bases, big pizzas, no peel |
Build and launch on a screen, onto a preheated stone or steel, and pull the screen out after two or three minutes once the base has set. You get the easy launch of a screen and most of the direct contact of a solid surface, at the cost of one extra oven-door opening.
This is the answer for anyone whose actual problem is launching rather than heat - which, honestly, is most people who come to this comparison. The other answer is to fix the launch properly, and that is what the launching guide is for.
Because we could not find one whose maker publishes anything beyond a diameter. No material specification, no wire gauge, no temperature limit. We are not going to rank products we know nothing about, so the picks below are the surfaces we can stand behind - and the honest recommendation on this page is that a screen is a launching aid, not a baking surface, and you should still own one of these underneath it.
Old Stone
The most useful stone shape for a home oven, at a weight one hand can manage, and one of the very few whose retailer publishes both a thickness and a weight.
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Unicook
A rectangle uses an oven rack better than a circle does, and at 6.6 published pounds this is the lightest surface here that still holds a useful amount of heat.
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Baking Steel
A quarter inch is the thickness where a steel stops being a novelty and stays a thing you can still lift. Its advantage over a stone is not preheat speed - it is what happens one second after the base lands.
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Every number on this page came from one of these, or from arithmetic on one of these that we showed in full.