Most air impingement ovens are set up to bake too fast for the crispiest crust, in fact, many of the companies still promote the ability to bake FAST as the reason to use their oven. Most pizzas in a deck oven will require about 6 to 7-minutes to fully bake while I’m still seeing air impingement ovens being set up to bake in under 5-minutes which is ok if you want volume but if you want crispy the oven has to be slowed down. Air impingement ovens do a GREAT job of managing any water released from the vegetable toppings during baking which really promotes crispiness especially in a DELCO operation, deck ovens are rather poor at managing any moisture on the top of the pizza so the tendency is to end up with a wet or soggy pizza in a DELCO operation, this can be addressed by reducing the amount of toppings used on the pizza. One other pitfall with air impingement ovens is if the dough contains more sugar than what is required to support fermentation or any eggs or milk the crust will brown too rapidly due to the intensity of the airflow, this leads one to thinking that the pizza is done while in reality it is not sufficiently baked for optimum crispiness. I see this quite often when the complaint is that the pizza is initially crispy after coming out of the oven but soon looses the crisp.
As for a radiant heating oven, yes, Middleby-Marshall, to the best of my knowledge, still makes their Hearth Bake Oven with a solid woven wire conveyor and electric radiant heat panels both above and below the conveyor. Radiant heat ovens work well with very thin crust pizzas but due to the shallow heat penetration of the IR (only about 0.25-inch) they don’t work as well with the thicker crust pizzas. The advantages of an IR oven are:
Excellent temperature zoning
Quiet operation
No gas
Efficient baking as the IR only heats the pizza, not the air surrounding it.
These are still popular ovens on cruise ships for the above reasons.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor