You avid homemade pizza people may already know this, but for those that don’t, let’s talk about how to achieve (at home) the same great pizza you enjoy at your favorite pizzeria.

According to Danilo Alfaro, recipe creator and cooking instructor (and homemade pizza aficionado), “True pizzerias bake their pizzas in an 800ºF wood-fired oven. The insanely high heat cooks the pie and produces the blistered, perfectly crispy crust that makes pizza so good—all in less than two minutes.

“The difference isn't just the temperature of the oven, but also of the baking surface itself—the ‘floor’ of the oven. A hot oven makes a hot oven floor and a hot oven floor bakes a crispy crust. This bottom heat also radiates upward through the pizza, so that the cheese and other toppings are cooked both by the hot air above it and the heat from underneath.”

This process explains why our homemade pizza attempts tend to fall short of REALLY good. Afterall, who has a wood-fired oven sitting in their kitchen? Does that mean you should give up on making homemade pizza? Absolutely not! With the right tool you too can reproduce the conditions of a wood-fired oven in your regular kitchen oven. The tool? The easy and inexpensive pizza stone.

Danilo says a pizza stone is a flat slab of stone that sits inside on your oven rack, where it soaks up and, more importantly, holds onto heat. Because unbaked pizza dough rests directly on it, the hot stone transmits its heat to the bottom of the crust, just like the floor of a wood-fired oven.

While different thicknesses are available, the thicker ones work better and are generally more durable, although they're more expensive and take longer to heat up.

Stone is porous and unlike a metal baking pan, its tiny cracks and crevices allow steam that evaporates from the cooking dough to escape (much better than a metal pan). Ultrasmooth metals surfaces tend to trap moisture, leading to a soggy crust rather than a dry, crispy one. (See example below of thick and porous stone.)

Although porousness is a key factor, the simple point is, a pizza stone works because it just gets REALLY HOT.

To correctly and safely use a pizza stone for your pizza baking, follow these steps:

• Place your pizza stone in a cold oven.
• Preheat to 500 F. Once the oven is preheated, so is the stone.
• Slide the pizza onto the stone (most easily done with a pizza peel).


• Bake until cheese is lightly browned.
• Remove the pizza and turn off the oven (most easily done with a pizza peel).
• When cool, brush the stone, don't wash it. Remember, it’s porous, so you don’t want anything but water entering its tiny cracks and crevices.

Danilo reminds us that pizza stones are susceptible to what's called "thermal shock," (rapid temperature changes like going straight from a hot oven to a cold countertop) can cause it to crack. Thus, cooking a frozen pizza on a pizza stone is another no-no, as is adding a cold stone to a hot oven.

The solution is to never take it out of the oven. This might seem extreme, but if you bake enough pizzas to need a pizza stone in the first place, it makes sense. While storing it in the oven creates a longer preheating tie, this practice helps equalize the oven's heat, minimizing so-called "hot spots."

I’ll close with one more smidge of pizza stone promotion: It’s a terrific surface for baking bread, especially flatbreads (like pita bread) and English muffins, homemade crackers and quesadillas. Crispy “food for thought!”

    Alice Osborne
    Weekly Newsletter Contributor since 2006
    Email the author! alice@dvo.com