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Pizza Stone for Oven: Your Trick to a Crispy Crust
Do you dream of recreating that perfect, blistered, pizzeria-quality crust right in your own kitchen? As a home cook, achieving that ideal crispness can be one of the biggest challenges when baking pizza in a standard oven. The secret weapon professional bakers swear by isn't a special dough recipe, but a simple, porous slab: the pizza stone. This tool fundamentally changes how heat interacts with your dough, making pizzeria-perfect pizza an achievable reality in your home.
How a Pizza Steel Works
Also known as a pizza steel, a pizza stone works by mimicking the intensely hot, conductive surface of a professional brick oven. Unlike a standard metal baking tray for oven use, which heats up quickly but loses heat just as fast, the thick stone is made of porous materials, like cordierite or ceramic, that absorb and retain a massive amount of heat. When you place your pizza on the preheated stone, the stored heat is transferred directly and rapidly into the bottom of the dough. This immediate and intense burst of heat is essential for quickly setting the crust, preventing it from becoming soggy, and creating that desirable crisp, airy texture.
How to Use a Pizza Stone in Your Oven
Using a pizza stone correctly is all about patience and getting your wall oven as hot as possible. Follow these steps for the best results:
- Placement: Place the pizza stone on the lowest or middle rack of your oven before turning the oven on. The stone needs to be in the oven during the entire preheating process.
- Preheating: This is the most crucial step. Preheat your oven to its highest temperature, typically 260–290°C, for 30–60 minutes. Knowing how long you need to preheat ensures the stone reaches and saturates with the maximum possible heat.
- Transferring the Pizza: Use a pizza peel dusted with cornmeal or flour to put your assembled pizza directly onto the hot stone quickly. The dusting acts like tiny ball bearings, allowing the dough to glide off easily without sticking.
- Baking: Bake your pizza until the cheese is bubbling and the crust is golden brown and crispy on the bottom. Check the underside of the pizza frequently by gently lifting it with a spatula; it should be deeply golden brown and firm to the touch, indicating that the crust is perfectly cooked through.
Why You Need It
If you love making pizza, a pizza stone is a worthwhile addition to your kitchen toolkit.
- Superior Heat Retention: The stone holds and radiates heat much better than metal, giving your crust the constant, intense thermal energy it needs to rise and crisp up quickly. For example, SMEG’s Pizza Stone is crafted with a refractory stone composition that allows the surface temperature to reach up to 350°C, enabling your pizza to cook quickly in minutes.
- Achieves Crispy Crust: The intense, direct heat instantly draws moisture out of the pizza dough, preventing a soggy bottom and delivering that authentic, firm, and airy crispy crust.
- High Versatility: It's not just for pizza! You can use the stone to bake bread, heat up frozen appetisers, or create perfectly browned cookies and pastries, making it a truly multi-functional tool.
Caring for a Pizza Stone
Caring for your stone is simple, but requires a few specific practices to ensure its longevity and performance.
- Stains and Burn Marks are Normal: Don't worry about discolouration. These burn marks and stains are simply a sign of a well-used, well-seasoned stone and actually contribute to its non-stick quality over time.
- Avoid Extreme Temperature Changes: Never expose the stone to sudden, severe temperature shifts. A quick change, like running cold water over a hot stone, can cause the material to crack or shatter due to thermal shock.
- Wait for It to Cool Before Handling: Always allow the stone to cool completely in the oven before attempting to remove or clean it. Handling a hot stone risks severe burns and can cause the material to crack if set on a cold surface.
- Never Oil or Season It: Unlike cast iron, you should never oil or season a ceramic or clay pizza stone. The stone is naturally porous, and applying oil will eventually lead to rancidity and cause the stone to smoke excessively during use.
- Don't Wash with Soap: Never wash your stone, especially with dish soap. The porous material will absorb the soap's residue, which will then taint the flavour of your next pizza. For cleaning, simply scrape off any baked-on residue with a bench scraper or spatula, and then wipe it down with a damp cloth.
- Storing the Stone in the Oven: The simplest place to store a stone is often right in the oven itself. Continuously heating up and cooling down the pizza steel for oven use can actually help maintain its seasoning and prevent thermal shock.
