cracked pizza stone - whaaaat???!!!
pizza stone cracked tonight - thought those things were supposed to withstand HIGH heat (isn't that the point? so you can achieve a crispy crust?). a big side chunk of the stone just split off as i pulled out pie no. 1 ... am going to take that as a good omen. but seriously, i didn't even realize this was a possibility. my oven was cranked to 500 for an hour beforehand (with stone inside), and then at the end i upped the heat a tad by turning on the broiler. Has this ever happened to anyone else in food52land?
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00 flour tends to be the most common grade sold in Italian specialty grocers, but bakers also use type 0 and type 2 flour (called "buratto") for pizza making.
Look at it this way, a stone is supposed to replicated a brick oven---would you swab down a wood burning brick oven floor because of some spilled food?
Clean the big stuff off with cycle of the self cleaning oven after slowly raising the temp before starting the self clean cycle.
What I use it for with pizza and breads is a surface to roll out the pizza dough--the nonstick quality makes moving the dough around very easy with no sticking.
Lately, I've been making oblong pizza. On the back side of a half sheet pan.
Two thing have changed me for that. Using Italian 00 Flour:
1 cup of 00, and 2 cups bread flour. 1 1/2 tsp sugar, 1 tsp salt, 1 table spoon olive oil. 1 cup warm water...and 1 1/2 tsp yeast.
And the second thing is making rolling out the dough on a silplat mat on the back of the half sheet pan..then invert it and decorate it.
It works. Yeah a long 50 min preheat with a stone is great...but the above tech works great. Heat is heat. Another thing is letting the pizza cool a bit on a cooling rack to prevent soggy bottom. We hate soggy bottom pizza.
The post here make sure no one thinks you should put silpat in a 500 degree oven. It's only rated for about 450 and here I use it for rolling out stuff.
It has handles integrated on each of the disk of the stone.
For my pizza making..I use a peel to deploy and retrieve the pizza. From the pictures of the Emile Henry..it would seem those handles would prevent ease of use with pizza peel.
Do you use a peel and is this true?
I have a Emile Henry Tagine I love. It's good stuff.
A lot of people keep their pizza stones in the oven on the lower rack in electric oven to act as a buffer to even out the heat.
The cracked stone is actually better for that because I can position the bits better. So, if I have something like a pie I can move those on the lower rack to cut down, or boost up some radiant heat from the lower element---making a bit of 'shade' for the pan.