A pizza stone is a wonderful addition to any kitchen and gives you that crispy brick oven taste for your homemade pizzas. If you take good care of your pizza stone, it will provide you with great pizzas for many years to come. Pizza stones are robust and heavy, but they do require some special care to prevent them from cracking and breaking.
Storing your pizza stone can be a challenge because of the space that it can take up. It is also quite heavy and may be a hazard when you have young children around who can pull it from a counter. Pizza stones are not friends with the floor, dropping your stone, even from a low height will likely result in it breaking.
This is because of the structure of the stone. It is designed to be porous so that it can absorb excess moisture from your pizza dough. As the stone heats up in the oven, it absorbs moisture from the pizza dough and the result is your lovely crispy restaurant style homemade pizzas.
After use, your pizza stone is very hot because it absorbs a great amount of heat from the oven. It also takes a very long time to cool down and you may want to leave it in the oven so that it can cool down gradually. When your pizza stone cools down too quickly it is also liable to break or crack because of sudden thermal changes. It is best to leave it overnight in the oven to cool down slowly.
After your pizza stone has cooled down completely, simply scrape the burnt on dough and toppings from the stone. Never was the stone with water and soap, the pores in the stone will readily absorb the soapy water, leading to one additional unwanted topping in your next pizza! Needless to say, dunking a warm stone into water is also a bad idea since the sudden change in temperature is sure to result in a cracked stone.
The best storage spot for your pizza stone is a cupboard somewhere in the corner where it will be kept dry and safe. Perhaps that corner cupboard that nobody really frisks when they are looking for something? Pizza stones are best stored away from any strong odors since they can also absorb them and add them to your next pizza. You can place other things on top of your pizza stone, just be careful not to place it somewhere where it may be dropped or something can fall onto it.
Some people even store their pizza stones in their ovens on a permanent basis. The logic behind this is that the pizza stone aids in temperature management of the oven and the oven is also one of the safest places to store the pizza stone. It is important to remember to remove the pizza stone from your oven when running the cleaning cycle to prevent the stone from cracking in the oven.
No matter where you choose to store your pizza stone, if you take good care of it, it will keep giving you great pizzas for a long time to come!