If you’ve ever been in the kitchen at a professional bakery or seen the oven in a good pizza place you’ll know why the pizza stone is an essential tool in every baker’s life. Professional bread ovens (and pizza ovens are an offshoot of that) have relatively small openings with heat coming from the top and bottom. They’re lined with a heavy stone that stores the heat and brings the heat source as close to the bread (or pizza) as possible.
Since our home ovens need to be more versatile they make trade offs. The opening in your home oven is huge in comparison. The distance between the heat source and the item being heated is relatively large and that’s a good thing. For roasting a chicken. It’s not so good for baking a bread or a pizza.
A pizza stone is the tool that we use to turn our home ovens into something closer to what the professionals have. Can you bake a loaf of bread or a pizza without one? Sure. Will it be better with one? Definitely.
When you’re cooking at home you know not to open the oven unless you absolutely need to. Every time you open that door you’re letting heat out. I know a lot of recipes that will have you preheat the oven significantly higher than it needs to be and then lower the temperature when you put the food in (or shortly thereafter) as a way to try and make up for that. You ever wonder why a pizzeria doesn’t worry about opening the oven to take out a slice or put in the next pie? Because the stone lining the oven is maintaining the temperature even while heat is escaping through that open door. A pizza stone gives us that.
When I make pizza I preheat my oven to 550°F/285°C and I turn it on, with the stone in, an hour before I’m ready to bake. I want not just the oven to be hot, I want the stone to reach that temperature. I want the dough to go into the oven and get that high heat right away. That first hit of heat kicks the yeast into high gear and gives me the airy crust on the outside of my pizza, the occasional bubble that is so yummy under the toppings. That’s what the pizza stone buys you. And that’s why you should buy a pizza stone.
My Baking Adventures 