How to Clean a Pizza Stone

Pizza is an Italian food, popularly relished all over the world. Needless to say, pizza is made up of an oven-baked round shaped bread, that serves as the base which is eventually covered with tomatoes or a tomato based sauce and mozzarella cheese. The flavor of a pizza gets more scrumptious when added with the huge variety of toppings available. These days, every corner of the world has its own local recipe for pizza which has added to the number of types available, of this mouth watering dish. Pizza has been traditionally baked on the pizza stone.

Pizza Stone

Pizza stone is actually a flat piece of earthenware and has all the properties of a stone. A stone is porous in nature and has thermal properties. The heat retaining properties of the stone prove advantageous when it comes to baking pizza because it gives pizza its magical crispy crust, by absorbing all the moisture off it. Modern day pizza stones are available in the ceramic materials as well.

Pizza baking stones are available in various sizes so, you can pick the size that fits the size of your oven. One can also make a DIY pizza stone by simply sticking two ceramic tiles together. The pizza baking stone must be kept in good condition. It must be cooled down in the oven itself to prevent the cracking of the pizza stone due to sudden temperature change. Pizza baking stone makes pizza taste so very delicious, just like the traditional ones. Pizza making can be a really tricky job if one is unaware of how to clean a pizza stone.

How to Clean a Pizza Stone

Cleaning the pizza stone is actually an easy job, provided you follow the right method. No matter what type your pizza stone is, it mostly gets cleaned very easily, using proper methods. Here are some useful tips on how to clean a pizza stone:

• First and the most important thing to do is to never use any form of soap on the pizza stone. The stone tends to absorb the smell of the soap and so the next time you bake a pizza, it may very much turn out to be soap flavor.
• If you want to clean the remains of the cheese off the pizza baking stone, you can place the stone in the self cleaning cycle of the oven. It ultimately melts the cheese off the pizza stone and makes it clean.
• Scratch any of the burnt pizza remains from the pizza stone by using a kitchen hand tool (scraper). Then rub it with a damp sponge and place it in a container full of plain but warm water. Soak the stone for 25 minutes and let it dry out fully. Repeat the procedure if the stone is not clean yet.
• Keep the pizza baking stone in the oven itself during the self cleaning cycle. It helps to make the pizza stone cleaning process much easy. But this might work in the wrong way because some ovens have long self cleaning cycles.
• In my opinion, the best thing to do would be, to preheat the pizza stone for ten minutes and then sprinkle some breadcrumbs, semolina or at least cornmeal before baking the pizza on it, this makes the surface of the pizza stone less sticky.

While cleaning the pizza stone with water, one must always keep in mind that the water must be plane and warm. Try out these methods of cleaning the pizza stone and let me know the end results!