I'm lucky enough to cook in a fantastic kitchen with granite work counters (which often mirror the flash when I take pictures but are otherwise awesome). Since a piece of the granite was cut out for the stove, we had a rather big and heavy block of granite sitting around, which lead to the idea of having it cut in shape to use as a pizza stone. Most pizza stones are made from chamotte (grog), but there are also some granite ones, only marble is chalkstone and therefore not suited for the heat differences, according to my research. You place the pizza stone on the grill rack of the oven (preferably with a margin of 1 cm all around to avoid areas of trapped heat), heat up the oven and bake the pizza or bread on the stone, which provides for the crisp pizza base by gradually suppliying the heat. You can use a wooden bread paddle to get the pizza into the oven, but since that seems to require some practice (and a wooden paddle), we used a wooden cutting board with a baking sheet on top. Sometimes you read that the pizza stone must have a porous surface in order to "absorb the humidity from the air", for which baking sheets pose a small problem. Since our stone has a smooth surface anyway (which is very helpful for cheese rests which tend to stink and burn in on chamotte stones), I guess the baking paper didn't matter. You could also remove it from under the pizza after 2 minutes of baking...but it worked very nicely like this, too!
Showing posts with label pizza. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pizza. Show all posts
2012-04-04
Project Pizza Stone
I'm lucky enough to cook in a fantastic kitchen with granite work counters (which often mirror the flash when I take pictures but are otherwise awesome). Since a piece of the granite was cut out for the stove, we had a rather big and heavy block of granite sitting around, which lead to the idea of having it cut in shape to use as a pizza stone. Most pizza stones are made from chamotte (grog), but there are also some granite ones, only marble is chalkstone and therefore not suited for the heat differences, according to my research. You place the pizza stone on the grill rack of the oven (preferably with a margin of 1 cm all around to avoid areas of trapped heat), heat up the oven and bake the pizza or bread on the stone, which provides for the crisp pizza base by gradually suppliying the heat. You can use a wooden bread paddle to get the pizza into the oven, but since that seems to require some practice (and a wooden paddle), we used a wooden cutting board with a baking sheet on top. Sometimes you read that the pizza stone must have a porous surface in order to "absorb the humidity from the air", for which baking sheets pose a small problem. Since our stone has a smooth surface anyway (which is very helpful for cheese rests which tend to stink and burn in on chamotte stones), I guess the baking paper didn't matter. You could also remove it from under the pizza after 2 minutes of baking...but it worked very nicely like this, too!
2012-04-03
Pizzaiola
Since I use this Pizzaiola for my Pizza and the next post addresses the Pizzastone Project, I didn't want to keep the recipe from you!
Also, a nicely wrapped jar of Pizzaiola makes a great last minute gift!
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