Pizza cooks unevenly (one side burns)

What you're seeing

You take the pizza out and one edge of the rim is close to black while the edge opposite it is barely tan. Underneath there is a scorched crescent on one side and a blond, soft patch on the other, on the same piece of dough that spent the same seven minutes in the same oven. The tell is that it repeats: the burnt side is always the far side, or always the left, pizza after pizza. That consistency rules out your stretching and your dough and points straight at the box.

The short answer

Every oven has a hot side, and a pizza that never moves bakes as if it were two different pizzas. Work out where your hot spot is, give the slab room for air to move around it instead of blocking the cavity, and turn the pizza 180° at about 60% of the bake so both halves get the same share of the worst heat. This is a positioning and timing fix, not a temperature fix.

Why it happens

Ovens are hot at the back, and they are hot at the back for structural reasons

The rear wall sits closest to the element, has the least insulation between it and the cavity, and in most designs carries the vent, so it re-radiates heat forward all through the bake. The door is the coldest surface in the box: a glass sandwich with a leaky seal, facing a room at 20 °C. A front-to-back spread of 20–40 °C across the slab is normal, not a fault, and it lands entirely on the far edge of your pizza.

Gas ovens are a sharper version of the same problem, the burner being a line of flame along one side rather than a distributed element. Wood-fired ovens are the extreme case: the fire is genuinely on one side, the floor near it can run a hundred degrees above the floor at the mouth, and a pizza left facing one way for a 90-second bake chars on the flame side before the opposite edge has coloured.

Blocking the cavity makes the gradient worse

A slab that fills the rack wall to wall stops air moving around it. Hot air rising from the lower element then has to squeeze past the edges, so it channels up the sides and along the back and leaves a stagnant, cooler pocket over the middle-front. Leaving a 2–3 cm gap at the sides and back turns the slab from a baffle into a shelf, and flattens the gradient measurably.

Rack height matters in the same way. Very low, and the slab sits directly in the lower element's line of fire and develops a genuine burnt patch wherever the element loops beneath it — the burnt base with undercooked toppings failure in a localised form. Upper-middle puts the slab out of that path and the toppings near the roof.

The dough is not neutral, either

A disc stretched thinner in one place cooks faster there, and thin spots collect on the side you pulled hardest. Dressing is the same story: a heap of sauce or a cold pile of cheese on one half holds it at 100 °C (212 °F) while its water boils off, so it browns later even in a perfectly even oven. If the top is running away from the bottom everywhere rather than on one side, that is cheese burning before the base cooks and a different fix. And a bank of pepperoni releasing fat down one side, as on a New York pepperoni, will brown that side harder than plain cheese ever does.

Fix it now

1. Map the oven before you bake. Preheat, then sweep an IR gun across the slab — front, back, both sides, centre — always comparing like with like. Bright steel reflects infrared rather than emitting it, so a gun fixed at 0.95 emissivity reads a bare corner tens of degrees below an oiled, seasoned patch next to it. Here that hardly matters: the same error lands on every point, so the front-to-back spread still holds even when the absolute numbers do not. Note where the highest reading is and which way it faces you.
2. No IR gun? Use bread. Lay six slices of white bread across the hot slab and grill for 60–90 seconds. The pattern of browning is a picture of your oven's hot spots, and it costs you a slice of toast.
3. Centre the slab and leave a gap. 2–3 cm clear at the sides and back. Upper-middle rack.
4. Turn at 50–60% of the bake. Around minute four of a seven-minute bake, lift with the peel, rotate 180°, set it back down. One turn, done quickly.
5. Open the door as little as possible. Have the peel in hand first; the cavity air is gone in a couple of seconds and the turn should take about that long.
6. In an outdoor oven, turn constantly instead. A 90-second bake wants a quarter-turn every 20–30 seconds, keeping the same edge away from the flame no longer than that.
7. Even out tonight's dressing. Spread the sauce to a consistent depth and distribute the cheese rather than heaping the middle. It will not fix the oven, but it stops you adding a second gradient on top of the first.

Prevent it next time

• Stretch to an even thickness. Work from the centre outwards, rotating the disc as you go, and hold the disc up to the light before dressing — thin windows show up immediately.
• Keep the slab in one known position. Once you have mapped the oven, stop moving the steel between bakes; the whole point is that the hot spot becomes predictable.
• Build the turn into your timer. Set two alarms, not one. The turn is the step people mean to do and then forget while they are dressing the next pizza.
• Watch the vent. If your oven vents through the back of the hob or a slot at the rear, treat the far edge as the hot side by default and turn towards it.
• Reset between pizzas. 15–20 minutes restores the slab's temperature and, as usefully, restores it evenly — a slab that has just fed a pizza is coldest exactly where the pizza sat.
• Let the dough relax so it stretches evenly. A tight ball fights back unevenly and leaves you with thick and thin patches in the same disc; a properly rested one comes out to a consistent thickness with no wrestling.