There are a few tools that you will need if you want to make exceptional homemade pizza.

A great dough recipe, mixing bowls, measuring spoons and a pizza pan or cookie sheet are essential.

If you want to take your pizza making to an expert level, you need a pizza stone. With this cooking tool you will be able to cook like a gourmet.

The best pizza in the world is made in a stone or brick oven. A baking stone attempts to recreate a brick oven in your home. The notion behind this is that the stone will absorb the heat in an oven and then transfer that heat to your pizza. This will cook your pizza quickly and evenly.

A pizza stone is an essential tool for anyone who wants to make great pizza. You can certainly make good pizza with a cookie sheet or a pizza pan. But a cooking stone (also known as a baking stone) will allow you to make fantastic homemade pizza that tastes like it came from a pizzeria.

You will also want to use a paddle, also known as a peel. Dust your peel with cornmeal or flour so your pizza will slide on and off your counter as you place it on your pizza stone. Then use your peel to take your cooked pizza off the stone.

The technique for learning how to use a peel can be a little tricky at first. You want to make sure you have enough flour or cornmeal underneath your pizza so the pizza will slide easily.

Then using a quick motion, slide you peel underneath the pizza. If it sticks, you can use a piece of dental floss to unstick it, so it will slide.

One of the most important tips for using a stone is to pre-heat it for an hour or more. The biggest mistake made by home chefs is not allowing the stone to heat up long enough. When you pre-heat, your stone will absorb all of the heat being generated by your oven.

Here is how not to use a cooking stone. A friend taking my advice, for cooking pizza, pre-heated his oven to 500+ F. (260+ C). He followed my advice and did indeed, pre-heat it for at least an hour…after the oven was hot, he put the pizza stone in the oven. He complained to me that he was very dissatisfied with the results.

It didn’t cook right he explained.

The mistake he made was by not having it in the oven when it was turned on!

Another great method is to use cooking stone is with a barbecue grill. You can heat the stone up as above and cook right on your grill. You will need to make sure that the stone you are using is made for use with a barbecue.

Remember all stones are not created equal. You can easily find a wide variety of cheaply made ones, but believe me cheap is not always better.

Here’s why: baking stones made of inferior quality materials will not last. While you may save a bit of money in the short term, in the long run a cheaply made one will end up costing you more money pizza meadville