Old Stone Oven Pizza Stone Round

I bought two of these, despite their relatively high price. I wanted to be able to cook two large pizzas at once for entertaining, so nobody waits slobbering while others eat their pizza.

I've made pizza twice and have not been disappointed. The stones are fairly soft and would scratch easily with sharp steel implements, so I'd avoid using them. The sone's porosity means it will stain easily. Spilled tomato sauce and cheese will bake right into the surface. I expect my pizza stones will quickly develop a patina. If you want clean looking pizza stones, the maintenance would be nearly impossible. Otherwise, maintenance is easy. Wash in hot water (no soap) and air dry. Use a belt sander or orbital sander if you ever want to renew the surface.

I'm surprised another reviewer received a broken pizza stone. The manufacturer packages these heavy and moderately fragile items very well with lots of corrugated cardboard. Both of mine arrived in perfect condition. They were shipped separately, like apparently everything from Amazon.

The crust is much better than the pizzas I was making in glass pie plates. It's crispy on the bottom and tender in the middle. The toppings are better too, because they are cooked at higher temperatures and have more of a roasted flavor. Before, pizzas cooked at 350 F for 25 minutes. The crust had good flavor but tended to steam under the vegetables and cooked very slowly. Now, I cook pizzas in ten minutes (!) and the crust and toppings are perfect. For entertaining, you could easily bake a pizza in the time it takes to assemble the toppings for the next pizza.

I just received the peel. For the uninitiated, a peel is the flat wooden pizza assembly station used to transfer the pizza to the stone in the oven. So far, I have made four pizzas without the peel and it's frustrating, and possibly dangerous working in a 500 F oven. Get the peel. It's not an option.

A tablespoon of corn meal on the peel and the stone will prevent the dough / crust from sticking.

The pizza stone is requiring a new learning curve, and I'm fairly sure it'll end up being a bit more effort than the pie plates I was using, but the much better pizza will be well worth the little extra effort. The peel and stone make it possible to have gourmet restaurant pizza at home. It's much easier than most people would think, and much less expensive than eating out. With no prior experience, expect 4-5 attempts to work out the tricks. After that, homemade pizza is fast and easy.

Pizza Dough:

1 1/8 cups of warm water

1 tablespoon sugar

1 tablespoon dry yeast

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon olive oil

3 cups bread flour

Combine all ingredients in a mixing bowl in the order listed. Mix by hand until liquid is absorbed. Use a heavy duty mixer (Kitchenaid, etc.) and a dough hook to knead the dough for ten minutes (highly recommended), or knead by hand on a floured bread board until the dough has a silky sheen (the labor intensive method). Spray with olive oil in the mixing bowl, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and let the dough rise until doubled in size. This takes 20-30 minutes in a 200 F oven (lowest setting) or on the stove top as the oven below is preheating. Makes two 14" pizza crusts.

I was working in the garage when I heard what sounded like a gunshot blast inside the house. I ran inside and found our old well-seasoned pizza stone cracked in three huge pieces and I was sad.

LESSON: Do NOT ever (EVER!) leave your pizza stone on stove-top burner that is turned on. It was an accident, but the result was loud, scary, and sad.

Quickly, we were in the market for a new pizza stone because we used it all the time and wanted to get a new one well-seasoned sooner rather than later. We bought the Old Stone version based on reviews and such and have been nothing but happy with it since we got it.

This pizza stone weighs a ton (about twice as heavy as our previous one), but it does a great job of retaining seasoning and cooling down. Our old one took a while to cool down, but this one seems to cool down a lot faster. If you're in the market for a pizza stone, I highly recommend this one.

A note on seasoning a pizza stone

Ask 100 people how to season a pizza stone and you'll likely get 100 answers. Here's mine. First off, NEVER wash a pizza stone with soap. The soap will get soaked into your stone and, well, make your food taste soapy. If anything, wash with water only. BUT, we never wash ours. Before you get all grossed out about it, we basically keep our pizza stone in the oven all the time. We cook everything we can on it (pizza, re-heated pizza, cheese sticks, heated sandwiches, etc.) and just let the juices and whatnot fall where it may on the pizza stone. By leaving it in the oven all the time, all of the leftover juices and whatnot basically gets burned into the stone and helps the seasoning process. In the end, through this process, the goal is to have a black pizza stone and that's when it will be completely non-stick and give you the best tasting pizzas you've ever cooked. It'll take a while (we've been going on almost a year now and it's just a dark brown), but it's well worth it.

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perfect stone for pizza,calzones,bread,etc.because of its thickness,size,and heat retention.it is also very stable in the oven due to the legs underneath and weight.other stones are 5/16th thick.this is 9/16th which makes a big difference.

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I saw an ad for a counter-top convection oven in which a pizza was baked at 500 degrees using a pizza stone. As my kitchen range (KitchenAid) has a convection oven and will bake at 500 degrees, I decided to buy this pizza stone. I like pizza. This stone is the largest and thickest I could find. I saw reviews for other stones where the stones had broken. I thought it would be best to buy a thick heavy stone. That describes this stone. We amateur cooks need the best equipment to offset our lack of skill.

Recipes for dough and pizza sauce came with the stone. The recipes are excellent. The instructions for the stone suggested a pizza peel, which I didn't have. I decided to make a pizza using the stone without a peel, which was a mistake.

The stone is put into the oven for at least an hour at 500 degrees I tried to put the uncooked pizza onto the stone by sliding it off a cookie sheet. This was a disaster. The pizza collapsed in a pile on the stone. The burnt dough stained the stone. The stone can be cleaned using a toothbrush. I then ordered a large metal pizza peel. Although stained, my stone is entirely functional.

The following week I made the second pizza using the stone. With my new pizza peel I was able to slide the uncooked pizza onto the hot stone. It worked well. The peel also worked well to remove the cooked pizza from the stone. I couldn't put the pizza onto the stone or get it off without the peel. Also, the stone is too hot to remove from the oven at the time the pizza is fully cooked.

The stone is very sturdy. I don't think it will break easily. I think it does a good job in baking pizza. The stone is so massive that its temperature probably is not reduced much by the uncooked pizza. That's the idea using the stone. The hot stone makes the crust crispy.

The stone fits in my range oven, but just barely. The oven door will just close without touching the stone.

Previous to buying the stone, I was using pizza kits along with a thin metal pizza sheet. Now, I make the pizza sauce and dough from scratch (using recipes that came with the stone). It's a pleasure and sense of pride to make the pizza from raw ingredients. The stone is an essential part of this process. The pizza taste is excellent.

I recommend that you buy a pizza peel if you buy this stone. I gave the stone five stars because I think it is as good as it gets.

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I did some studying prior to buying my new pizza stone. We're a two chef household so artistan breads and baking are important to us...but we cook so much that we're known to even do gourmet pizzas on the grill. Often. Even some frozen pizzas!

Because we have a new grill, (A "Big Green Egg" which has a smaller top than our old one), our old stone no longer fit. I have a degree in art with an area of emphasis in pottery so that combo of culinary school and pottery knowledge of clay and high fire temps makes me a very picky consumer.

I had already discussed pizza stones that were strong enough to withstand even grill heat with others and knew some NEVER cut it (Pampered Chef is thin and will break on a grill almost every time according to the cooks on the Big Green Egg website and a friend with a grilling tv show) and some SOMETIMES cut it but might break, and then some others could take the heat AND stay IN the kitchen.

This was one. So I took the early recommendations then looked at Amazon reviews as well. This had some of the highest ratings and the low ratings were from it not being packed well in shipping...rarely from cracking easily as other stones were said to in their reviews. Granted, that doesn't make it UNbreakable. It's still ceramic. And sometimes cooks believe a ceramic piece to break suddenly (in the oven, in a dishwasher) when in actuality it had a hairline crack in it which caused it to break when heated...which I am not saying was the cause of the person who had theirs crack, but could be.

I say that only because I did quite a bit of research first for a commercial quality stone that can withstand not just ordinary oven heat, but also direct flame at very high heat on the grill. And this one came up the winner each time, even in a restaurant supply store (which by the way, was more expensive than my just ordering it from Amazon which I did as you can see from my purchase stamp. Kudos Amazon.) It had to be thick, of kiln-quality fire brick material...

I wanted brick oven pizza with the smokiness of the grill.

Success!

And when I cook my artistan breads or pizzas in the ove...it does just as well.

As an aside, you aren't supposed to put your dough directly on a pizza stone. Put cornmeal down first. It won't stick and is a nice addition anyway. Once it's black and well seasoned, you can then.

Always preheat your pizza stone as you heat up the oven or grill. Dont ever put it in a hot oven or grill. It's not good for the stone and it won't work...in order to get crispy crust, it must be hot when you put your dough on it.

It won't be non-stick until it's been used many many times..."seasoned"... How will you know? It's black by then.

...never wash it. Never put it under water. Scrape it. Trust me on this one although non-chefs expect to die from it. You won't. Google it...it's how you use a pizza stone. (grin) Also, if you put water or soap on it will absorb it. You dont want to eat pizza soap. Nopers.

This is the perfect size as it allows the heat to flow up AROUND the stone easily as well.

For easy homemade pizza, you can buy a box or bag of pizza dough mix in your pizza aisle if you don't want to make your own dough, make it up, get your grill hot, throw your formed dough down knowing it will rise some as it cooks, once it's cooked well on one side, flip it, add sauce, and yummy things like mozz. cheese, a little olive oil, a little fresh basil and some fresh ricotta and sliced tomatoes...ooooeeee.

p.s. you can also put pizza dough directly on grill grates...they create different flavors but it's harder not to burn that way.

NEGATIVES: There is a risk this could arrive broken if you have a crazy UPS man. Ours was packed well but apparently some others had this issue so the company may sometimes not pack well. Good news is that I've returned items before to Amazon and they have been good about refunds and exchanges. Ours was packed perfectly so maybe this is no longer a risk, but since it happened to more than one person according to the reviews I read, this may be an issue. I know there is always a risk when you ship something made from clay...but that would bother me to wait on an item that arrived broken as well.