You Need A Pizza Stone

The secret to cooking perfect pizza really is a pizza stone. Here’s how Jim Lahey uses one.

WHAT THE PROS KNOW | No matter how you do pizza at home—from scratch, from half-scratch with premade dough and store-bought sauce or from take-and-bake (doctored Dr. Oetker anyone?)—the taste and consistency of your pie will be infinitely improved if you bake it on an pizza stone.

I was seriously shocked at how much better my frozen pie tasted a few months back when I baked it on an inexpensive no-name ceramic pizza stone ($13 from HomeSense) rather than on my Cuisinart non-stick pizza pan. And I was shocked again this week at how much better the crust performed when I used the stone precisely as described in no-knead bread guru Jim Lahey’s new cookbook My Pizza: The Easy No-knead Way to Make Spectacular Pizza at Home.

Lahey, the NYC baker behind the no-brainer bread phenomenon (CLICK HERE for our story), also runs Co., a Chelsea pizzeria where the unusual Roman-inspired slices have earned a cult following. His recipes for no-knead pizza dough and crazy good toppings are definitely worth the price of the book ($31 at Indigo), and so are his easy-to-follow instructions for using the stone.

Pie-Eyed

The best pizza crust is crisp (on the bottom), chewy (on the top) and charred (i.e., blistered on the edges). You can get close to this perfection using a home oven by following Lahey’s instructions.

Lahey prefers using a 3/4-inch-thick commercial pizza stone at home but says a 1/2-inch-thick home-grade model will get the job done too. “My heating method is to preheat the stone, first on bake at 500 degrees F [for 30 minutes] and then under the broiler [for 10 minutes], so the surface has climbed to well over 600 degrees by the time you call on it to do the work.”

The actual cooking time for a pizza on a stone this hot is mere minutes, and you may need to check on its progress often. Lahey says not to worry about losing heat when you open the oven to peek in, and that you’ll know your pie is finished when “the surface is bubbling, and the rim is deeply charred but not actually burnt.”—Annabel Lee

My Pizza: The Easy No-knead Way to Make Spectacular Pizza at Home is available for $19.44 at Indigo books online; CLICK HERE for the link.

TO WIN A COPY of  Jim Lahey’s cookbook, CLICK HERE to follow @teamfrugalbits on twitter before March 31.

Photos, top to bottom: Emile Henry’s award-winning pizza stone from Williams-Sonoma;  Squire Fox, from My Pizza: The Easy No-knead Way to Make Spectacular Pizza at Home published by Clarkson Potter