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. Read more