Conference turris::cooks

Try buying unglazed quarry tiles to cover the desired area.  I have not done 
this myself, but know a couple of folks who have (with gas stoves).  Besides, 
Julia swears by it!

						     
							- JP

I bought two stones at Dish 'n Dat in Burlington, MA. They are round
and cost $10.95 each. I haven't tried pizza yet, but they work fine
for bread baking. Since my oven is small, about 20 inches wide, I can
only fit one stone at a time.  I can bake two small loaves or one
large loaf on each stone. The stones are about 18 einches across.

I am also looking for a place to buy a peel.

Patti

    What's a peel?  I kind of figured it's the paddle you use to slide
    pizzas, breads, in and out of the oven.  Is that correct?  
    Also, may I suggest a restaurant supply house for both the "peel"
    and the stone?  They usually have the larger sized items.
    I have seen Julia CHild use unglazed quarry tiles for the same purpose,
    also.  And I believe they come in all kinds of sizes, too.
             
    Sarah
    

    I AGREE WITH  (RE .3) 
    
    I have seen the peels in a resturant supply house Here in Springfield
    Mass. If I am not mistaken the cost between $10 - $18. I am not
    sure on the stone though.
    
    These store usually do busness with rest. however I have found they
    usually won't refuse cash.
    
    John
    

    The Spice & Grain in Concord carries or at least used to carry
    rectangular oven stones. I got two of them there about 2 years ago.
    I haven't been in there in awhile so I don't know if they still
    carry them. The ones we got are about 10 X 12 and are great for
    pizza bread and cookies(use baking parchment).
    				
    						Geoff

re .2

Try Cook's Nook in Lunenburg on Rt 2a near the Fitchburg line.  (They might be 
listed under Cook Things in the phone book.)  I believe you could order by 
phone.

						     
							- JP

    Every sunday night is pizza night in our house...
    
    My husband, Carl, makes absolutely the BEST pizza I've ever had.
    I bought him some very inexpensive unglazed quarry tiles from the
    local cheap tile store.  He lines the bottom shelf of the oven
    (electric) with these tiles and preheats for at least 30 mins. at
    550 degrees.
    
    He uses a rather large peel which I purchased for him at Lechmere's.
    I think it cost somewhere around 11.99-12.99.  The peel is covered
    with cornmeal and the pizza is actually made on the peel then slid
    into the preheated oven.
    
    All of these ideas came from a book called "The Pizza Book".  I
    can't recall who the author is, but has wonderful recipes and ideas
    in it.  The pizza recipe Carl uses is one served by a place in New
    Haven, Ct. which is famous for it's pizza.
    
    	- Kathy

    When you open the oven door to insert the food, the hot air escapes,
    and the replacement air must then itself be heated before it can start
    to heat the food.  The slab of clay/brick/stone/whatever cannot cool
    that rapidly and offers considerable thermal energy to be conducted
    into the food without delay. 

    This is not a new invention or discovery but rather a substitute for
    one of the characteristics of primitive ovens where a fire would be
    built directly on the floor of a brick oven, the coals swept out, and
    the food baked on the oven floor.  The stone is now the hot "floor".
    
    When bread is baked in pans, I don't think there is any benefit to
    having a stone under the pans, but I'd like to hear from those with
    more experience.  The real payoff is in the baking of free-form loaves
    and pizza.  The rapid heat influx causes the bottom layer of dough to
    really rise, to "spring".  The cross section of the loaf will tend to
    become circular with the edges rounding up off the flat.  The center
    crust of the pizza bakes well despite the pool of sauce on top. 

    When you use one, put it in the oven before the start of preheat. 
    Use cornmeal as a non-stick agent, but not enough to insulate the
    dough from the stone.  The stone should be everywhere visible through
    the sprinkling of cornmeal (or flour).

        Has anyone tried using the oven bricks with a gas oven instead
        of an electric? How does the warm up time differ, I know my
        oven won't hit 550 deg? 
        
        What about any other uses other than bread/pizza?
        
        Dave
        
        Al, could I ask a favor? could we start a new note on pizza
        recipes I hate to see good recipes buried in notes where I/other
        people can't find.....8^} 
        thanks
        

    re .11
    
    We use a pizza stone in a gas oven, works fine. We crank the
    oven up to 500 to heat the stone.
    
    mike

I bought a 14" peel at Central Restaurant Equipment & Supply Co, 80 Canal
Street, Boston. They give a 20% discount to cash sales. It came out to be $19.
They have 12", 16", and 18" ($30) peels also, both metal and wood. Right now,
the only 16" ones they have are metal. These peels all have about 3' handles
but the handle can easily be sawwed off. They had a saw there. This store has
everything. 

Williams-Sonoma in Faneuil (sp?) Hall has a small peel (12" inches, I think)
that has a short handle (6") for around $18.00. 

Patti

    The use of a peel with an oven stone was discussed in notes 947.13 and
    72.26 (formerly 994.8), although those notes may not have been clear
    that the cornmeal was put on the peel, not directly on the stone.  At
    550 degrees, uncovered cornmeal will burn.  Cornmeal on the peel will
    be carried onto the stone by the dough and then be sufficiently
    protected. 

    Note 947.13 mentioned substitutes for peels; this note is about a
    substitution experience. 

    My peel was occupied by a loaf of rising bread when my son was ready to
    make the pizza for lunch.  So I used a piece of clean, 1/4 inch plywood
    as a substitute, dusted it with cornmeal, and spread out my dough.
    When he had finished building a mountain of sauce, cheese, etc., I
    tossed the structure over the oven stone and yanked the peel back.  The
    cornmeal was not quite adequate over the plywood; the dough sort of
    came back with the peel, at least part way back.  The cheese decorated
    the rear of the oven.  For the second pizza, I covered the plywood with
    aluminum foil with a wrap around the edge-to-be-held-later.  The foil
    was then dusted with cornmeal.  That combination worked well for both
    the second and third pizza.  I will never again use bare plywood. 

    p.s.   I now know that my smoke detector is in working order. 

        Thanks to Kathy Appellof's reply, I was finally
        inspired to get off my duff and buy the quarry
        tiles and peel that I'd been threatening to get
        for years. 
        
        The quarry tiles were $.40 each at Color Tile
        on Rte 101a in Nashua, and the peel was $19.99
        at That Kitchen Place, Rte 101a in Amherst,
        NH.  
         
        Thanks, Kathy.  The Italian bread was great.
         
        
        -mrs o 
        

    Well, I finally bought my Stone and Peel (after authoring .0).  Thanks
    for the help.
    
    I bought a great book on bread (Clayborn or something like that).
    It is the most complete book on bread that I have seen.  Over 700
    pages.  It includes directions for making it by hand, mixer, and
    food processor with every recipe.  That's a real plus too me since
    I use a food processor and the directions are usually a bit different.
    I bought another book on pizza.  This one gives directions for buying
    quarry tile to use in the oven.
    
    They say to specifically ask if any toxic chemicals etc were used
    in the manufacture of the tiles.  I asked the folk at color tile
    and the response was "damn if I know".  I decided not to take a
    chance.
    
    Cook's Nook in Lunenburg finally got their rectangular stones. I had
    originally checked there (before authoring .0) but they only had the
    round ones.  I bought a 14" X 16" stone for about $25 or $26.  It is a
    lot more money than quarry tile, but it has two big advantages.  First
    it is one piece so I dont have to worry about it sepatating while I
    slide the pizza onto it.  Second, It is much thicker than the tiles and
    therefor should have more thermal mass.  Since it is made for pizza, I
    will make the assumption that it is safe to cook on.  I also bought
    a peel for $15.50.
    
    Now for my next question.  My pizza book says to never wash a peel in
    water because it may warp.  It says to use mineral oil to season and
    protect it.  What is this stuff, where do you buy it, and is is safe
    for use next to food?
    
    /Jim Pappas
    
    

Mineral oil is available in many CVSs, and some grocery stores.  Make sure to 
buy pure mineral oil.  It's recommended for butcher block counters and cutting 
boards.  Its completely safe (sort of, if you take the stuff by the spoonfull, 
you'll become as regular as clock ticks).  In fact, I believe it's the basis 
for Johnson's baby oil.

As I see it you'll only have one problem... What to do with the rest of the 
bottle once you've used the tablespoon or so needed to oil your peel.

						     
							- JP

    From the dictionary:  any of several light hydrocarbon oils, especially
    a refined distillate of petroleum used as a laxative.
    
    Yes, it's safe -- it's an ideal oil for protecting wood (butcher
    blocks, cutting boards, and the like) in that it doesn't turn rancid.
                                                  
    					andrew

    I agree with JP (994.17).

    Mineral oil is another product (like gasoline, motor oil, and paraffin
    wax) made from crude oil.  Like paraffin, it is more or less tasteless
    and indigestible, passing through without assimilation.  Soaked into
    a wooden utensil with the excess wiped off, it is harmless. 

    It can be bought at a pharmacy; it is used by the spoonful in the
    treatment of constipation.  Besides the pharmacies and certain grocery
    stores, a local hardware store sells it as "Bemis Wood Conditioner" 
!   at $3.59 for 8 fl oz., but the price is a lot less at CVS where CVS 
!   Mineral Oil sells at $2.29 for 16 fl oz.  Baby oil is not quite the 
!   same stuff; baby oil contains fragrance additives.

I tried out my new stone and peel for the first time last night.  I
    bet everyone has a first time story similar to mine.  I guess I
    didn't use enough corn meal! I knew I was in trouble when I tried
    to slide the pizza into the oven, and figured right then it would
    be no fun to get out! I was right.  Well, it wasn't the best looking
    pizza, but tasted much better than the ones cooked without the stone!
    
    What about cooking the pizza on a pan placed on the stone? Has anyone
    tried this? I do much better with the pan than the peel... Well
    a little practice will help! 
    

    re: .20
    
    Ok, I'll fess up.  My first experience with the stone and peel is
    worse than yours.  Like you, I used too little corn meal.  Also,
    the peel was unseasoned.  The result was a pile of pizza goop on
    a 550 degree stone, sizzling, smoking, you name it and it was doing
    it.  We had just put the baby to bed and all the smoke alarms were
    going off.
    
    The stone had big globs of burnt food on it.  They were pretty tough
    and wouldn't even scrape off.  Once through the oven self cleaning
    cycle did a nice job cleaning up the stone. 
    
    Just today, I seasoned the peel with mineral oil.  It seems a bit more
    slippery.  Next time I attempt a pizza I'll use a lot more corn meal. 
    
    BTW,  My pizza goop came out like a giant calzone.

    When sauce leaked out of a calzone onto the oven stone yesterday, the
    stone split in half.  Sigh.  The stone has survived dribbles at the
    edges from pizzas, but this was in the center and may have been a small
    gush of cold sauce onto a very, very hot stone. 

    After my round ovenstone broke in two I took it back to That Kitchen
    Place near MKO and received a merchandise credit; they didn't carry a
    rectangular stone.  I bought a 14x16x5/8 "Upper Crust" stone made by
    Best Manufacturers of Portland, Oregon at the kitchen supplies store in
    The Mall of New Hampshire.  I'm very pleased.  A pair of rye loaves
    fits nicely on this shape. 

    Has anyone been able to clean up the stains that get left behind
    ocasionally?  I have a few spill on my stone that won't come off.
    I have scraped all the spills off, but the 'stain' won't.  Is it
    now a part of the stone?   Any Suggestions?  
    
    						.dave.

    The last time I made pizza [dough], my son blew it when he tossed
    the complete pizza onto the stone ---- turned it into a sort of
    calzone --- sort of.  A mess that he had to shovel off the stone.
    (That will teach him to lubricate the peel with enough corn meal.)
    
    I left the stone in the oven and set the oven to self-clean for
    the standard [with Jenn-Air] 3 hours.  The stone is now very clean,
    almost exactly like new.
    
    I have not yet used it since that cleaning.  That will be the test
    of success.

    I wonder what would happen if you left the pizza on a cookie sheet
    and put that on the stone - wouldn't the sheet conduct the heat
    to the pizza and avoid spills etc ?
    
    Rod

re: < Note 994.27 by PBA::EDWARDS >

Rod,

It works. I'm a travelling pizza maker. I lug all my pizza stuff
(stones, peel, etc.) over to friend's houses to make pizza.
Occasionally I forget to bring my peel with me. I just make the pizza
on a lightly greased pizza pan and put the pan on the stone. The
crust isn't as good as it is when it is baked directly on the stone,
but it is much better than it is if you use the pan without the stone.
In my own kitchen, I can easily get the pizza off the peel (except
when I forgot to put cornmeal on it), but I sometimes have a little
trouble in other kitchens - the oven is too high or too low. Using the
pan with the stone is neater but not as much fun.

Patti

This may sound silly, but I take it you use the peel to get the pizza off
the (very hot) stone?

Does the heat damage the peel any?

Also, how long (on average) does it take the stone to cool down.

Do you leave the stone in the oven when cooking non pizza's - just to get
the heat retention?

Rashid

re: < Note 994.29 by BUSHIE::KOTWAL

>This may sound silly, but I take it you use the peel to get the pizza off
>the (very hot) stone?

Yup. You just slide the peel under the pizza and lift it off. Of
course this is sometimes easier said than done. My never fail method
is to place the front edge of the peel under the edge of the pizza,
take a sharp knife and stab the edge of the pizza crust and drag it
onto the peel. 

Alot of times when I am making many pizzas, I use the peel to build
them and use a pizza pan to take them out of the oven. I use the stab
and drag method above to get the pizza on the pan.

>Does the heat damage the peel any?

I bought my peel at a restaurant supply store. It's a commercial-grade
wooden peel. I can't remember what kind of wood. It might be ash. It
sometimes seems a little warped. Every so often I place the slightly
warm stone on top of the peel to reflatten it. 

>Also, how long (on average) does it take the stone to cool down.

By the time I've served the pizza and cleaned up the kitchen, the
stones are pretty cool. When the weather is cool, I leave the oven
door open to dissipate the heat. But in the summer I leave the oven
closed.

>Do you leave the stone in the oven when cooking non pizza's - just to get
>the heat retention?

I use them for baking bread. The directions for the stone say they are
good for baking cookies too. I never make cookies so I haven't tried
it. I usually forget to take my stones out of the oven. When I open
the oven to put in dinner to bake, I usually find them there. I just
put the baking dish on the stone. It cooks a little faster.

I broke one of my 14" round stones, I just replaced it with a 16"
round stone from Dish n Dat in Burlington, MA. It's so much easier to
use. Using my 14" peel with a 14" stone can be tricky. With the 16"
stone, I know that the pizza won't grow over the edge of the stone.

Patti 

> I use them for baking bread. The directions for the stone say they are
> good for baking cookies too. I never make cookies so I haven't tried
> it. I usually forget to take my stones out of the oven. When I open
> the oven to put in dinner to bake, I usually find them there. I just
> put the baking dish on the stone. It cooks a little faster.

We bake our chocolate chip cookies on our pizza stone.  Makes a great chewy
cookie!  Let me add that for baking cookies, we don't preheat the stone.

--Sharon

    I see several references in this topic about setting the oven to
    500-550 to heat the stone.  Do you still leave the oven at 500-550
    once the pizza is on the stone or do you reduce the temperature?

	I leave the oven at 500.  The pizza takes maybe 10 - 15 minutes to
	cook.

	Sue

    A cookbook that my wife was recently looking through said an
    alternative to using cornmeal was to use a pizza screen.  I guess
    the dough is put on the screen and screen put on the stone.  Has
    anyone used a pizza screen?  Know any stores that carry them?  What
    is the distance between the wires which make up the screen?

	I grease my pizza screen with olive oil.  I shape the pizza dough
	on the counter, brush it with olive oil, then fold it into quarters
	for quick transport to the screen.  Once on the screen, I unfold it
	and fix the shape a little.  I place the screen directly on the
	pizza stone (I bought 6 6"x6" unglazed quarry tiles from the tile
	store for about $6.).

	The screen is ~ 18" in diameter. The holes made by the wires are
	diamond shaped and the wires are maybe .25" apart.  I bought mine
	at The Kitchen in the Pheasant Lane Mall, but I've also seen them
	at Crate & Barrel.

	Sue

    I got a pizza set last year for christmas and have been making my
    own pizza ever since. The kit came with the tiles and a metal paddle.
    However, I don't care for the taste of the cornmeal on the bottom of
    the pizza and have been looking for an alternative. I thought that
    the reason the kit suggested cornmeal was because it was a metal paddle
    and that if I could find a wooden like they use in the pizza shops I
    could get away from using cornmeal. I have watched the pizza shops 
    make pizza and I have never seen them use cornmeal. Does anyone know
    what their secret is?
    
    
    
    -Jim-

 Some use flour instead.

    I've used wheat germ or wheat bran just for something different.
    
    ed

regular cream of wheat cereal also works...for non continental USA noters,
it is a "cooked cereal" like oatmeal, only it is simply rough ground wheat
berries - without the bran.

    Well, we finally found recipes for crust and sauce that are good enough
    to inspire us to begin cooking pizza the "right" way -- on a stone.  So
    last weekend was our first encounter.  Having read the notes in this
    string, we used plenty of cornmeal, and getting the pizza off the peel
    wasn't really a problem.  It turned out delicious!  One thing I found
    interesting was that the folks in here have said their pizza cooks in
    10-15 minutes on a 550-degree preheated stone.  Well, ours was nicely
    done in 5 minutes.  Perhaps our oven is hotter???
    
    Anyway, I have a question.  When we took the pizza out of the oven, the
    space directly under it contained un-burned cornmeal since the pizza
    had protected it from burning.  But the cornmeal that had scattered
    around the pizza when it slid off the peel was burned quite black (and
    smelled one whole end of the house like burned food, not to mention the
    smoke that poured out of the oven).  Also, if we had been fixing another
    pizza, by the time it was assembled on the peel, the cornmeal that had
    been directly under the first pizza would have been burned to a crisp
    also, since the oven was still nuclear and the cornmeal was unprotected
    once the pizza was removed from the oven.  What I was wondering is,
    what do you do if you want to cook more than one pizza?  The stone is
    far too hot to clean the burned (and burning) cornmeal off of it, but I
    wouldn't want to slide another fresh pizza onto that black, burned
    mess.  Did we use too much cornmeal?  What do you do for the second
    thru nth pizzas??
    
    Steve

re: .42

>    1.  Do I have to preheat the stone?
>    2.  Assuming I don't have to preheat the stone can I make/assemble the
>        pizza itself right on the stone and then pop it in the oven?
    
If you don't preheat the stone, then you might as well not use it.  The
stone's purpose is to apply intense heat to the pizza crust.

To prevent cracking the stone, you should put it in the cold oven before
preheating.

To get the pizza onto the stone in the oven, I recommend that you get a
wooden pizza peel.  This essentially is a wooden paddle with a tapered
edge for sliding off the pizza.  Sprinkle the peel with (preferably coarse)
cornmeal, then put the pizza crust on it, add the pizza toppings, then
slide the pizza off of the peel onto the stone.  The cornmeal acts like
little ball bearings to allow the pizza to slide.  It may take a bit of
practice before this operation can be done without peril. :-)

-Hal

    Also, I would not recommend taking the stone out of the oven until it
    is cool.  Changing the temperature of the stone too quickly can cause
    it to crack.  (So basically, the wire rack is not very useful for
    transporting the stone.)
    
    Make sure you brush the corn meal off the stone between pizzas or else
    it'll smoke.

    I haven't used the wire rack since the stone's first days.
    
    ed

    Yum, rolls made out of store bought bread dough on the pizza stone 
    Yummmmmmm
    
    Probably much better when you do it with homemade dough but the store
    bought stuff is really good and really easy.
    
    Judie
    
    
    
    

A pizza stone is great for baking any bread product where you want a good
crispy underside (provided it's self-contained and isn't going to run
all over your stone.)