Thursday, December 9, 2010

We recently lost our pizza stone because someone left in on a stove burner and it cracked.   I was initially not enthused with the idea of a pizza stone and thought it would be an under used unitasker in the kitchen.

Turns out it has been much more useful than we ever expected.   Sheila tried making biscuits on it and it baked them faster and gave them a crisper bottom.   Sheila makes biscuits for breakfast about once a week.  Free form rustic tarts work on it very well as does anything with puff pastry.   So it turns out to have been much more useful that I had ever thought and we needed to replace the broken one.

 I was not thrilled by the price, pizza stones cost significantly more than a basic unglazed tile and that is really all they are.   And since that is what they are, so I thought we would go buy some and try them out.   I ordered them through Tile Town and they were very reasonably priced

The picture to the left is the results of the first set of biscuits.   Quite a reasonable result, but I noticed some small cracks in the tile.    The tile did not deal with the heating and cooling well.   Sheila tried making some pizzas on the other two and they suffered much worse, they slowly shattered in the oven.

So it was an interesting experiment but ultimately failed.   We have ordered three regular pizza stones.

I know that there are tiles out there that should be able to endure this, it is just a question of ones that have been fired to a high enough cone  - I am thinking stoneware should be the right level.   I think I will try to make some at the pottery studio.

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