6

I would like to invest in a pizza stone and have read that leaving it in the oven is acceptable and possibly preferable in some ways. However, my oven my electric. Do I leave the stone on the lowest rack mere inches from the bottom heat source or should it be a particular distance from the coils?

What about when I am baking casseroles, cookies, etc. Is it safe to put a pan directly on top of the stone?

A final question... is using my oven in broil mode also safe for the stone? My electric in "broil" is just the top heat source turned up super high.

Aaronut
  • 54,811
  • 24
  • 191
  • 303

1 Answers1

7

The stone will be fine kept in your oven all the time, but there are trade-offs. The biggie is that your oven will preheat slower than you're currently used to--potentially quite a bit if you get a large or heavy stone. And you will really need to make sure that the stone has reached the desired oven temperature (by preheating longer) or the way things cook in your oven will be thrown off. The oven may claim to be fully preheated before the stone is really up to temperature because the thermostat just measures the air temperature, which can be higher than the stone, or even the sides of the oven for a while.

The upside is that your oven will retain heat better and generally be more even in its heat. So if you are willing to properly preheat that stone, you'll probably benefit in the long run.

As you've divined already, you'll have to put it on one of your oven racks as low as it will go toward the bottom of the oven. You don't want to put it right on the coils, but you want it as close as it will go. This means you'll have one less rack available to you. In practice this may not matter much, but it's a thing.

I wouldn't recommend putting a pan directly on the stone, but that's because it would completely change how heat gets to the pan. When a pan is on a rack, there's heated air circulating around from all sides. If it sits on a preheated stone the pan now has direct heat conducted to the bottom--which will change how things cook, and many things you'd cook in the oven don't want that direct heat.

Broil mode should be fine with the stone in the oven. I wouldn't want to put a cold stone right up by the broiler as the thermal shock might crack it, but with it at the bottom of the oven there should be no issues, even if the stone isn't heated up.

bikeboy389
  • 9,665
  • 38
  • 39
  • I've never had a stone crack under the broiler, but both stones I own came with warnings not to use them under the broiler (it's just difficult to live without finishing certain dishes with the broiler). – Bruce Alderson Jan 22 '11 at 23:14
  • @bikeboy389 why would you use a special pizza stone if you don't put the pizza on it? Surely a small pile of new/used fire bricks would have more mass and be much cheaper? I have found thermal mass in a domestic electric oven does not seem to help the pizza cooking process anyway. Try it some time :-) – TFD Jan 23 '11 at 01:34
  • @TFD--I'm having a little trouble figuring out where I advocated not putting the pizza on the stone. That's the whole point of a pizza stone. – bikeboy389 Jan 23 '11 at 19:59
  • @bikeboy389 What does "I wouldn't recommend putting a pan directly on the stone" mean then? – TFD Jan 24 '11 at 20:36
  • @TFD--that's in response to the OP. He asks about what to do when he's baking a casserole, etc. That's the pan I refer to. If you're cooking a pizza, it should go directly on the stone. So I guess if someone's going to cook a pizza in a pan, I wouldn't recommend putting that on the stone either. Based on your technique, I'd say that's where you got confused as you would need a pan of some kind doing it your way. Maybe that's why your way works better for you--if you're using a pan AND stone, the stone isn't going to work as well. – bikeboy389 Jan 24 '11 at 20:52
  • @bikeboy389 - physics: if stone requires a long preheat to come up to temperature before putting pizza on it, it will take proportionally longer still to come back to temperature when pizza is placed on it. The only real advantage to putting pizza on a stone is moisture absorption, which can be fixed by making proper pizza dough in first place :-) You will get a higher temperature for the few minutes it takes to cook a pizza without it, use a IR thermometer to check – TFD Jan 25 '11 at 21:46
  • @TFD: You place great stock in thermal mass, except when you talk about the pizza cooling the stone. The thermal mass of stone will also resist cooling (and how cold is your pizza anyway? 60F?)--giving you plenty of heat to cook the pizza with the remaining heat by the far more efficient process of conduction rather than convection. – bikeboy389 Jan 25 '11 at 22:19
  • @TFD: Also, the real advantage to putting a pizza on a stone is NOT moisture absorption. If the stone is 500 degrees, and it should be, it's not going to absorb ANY moisture unless you dump a quart of water on it. The point of the stone is to cook the bottom fast using direct heat conduction, rather than waiting for the comparatively inefficient and indirect convection of hot air. – bikeboy389 Jan 25 '11 at 22:21
  • @bikeboy389 If the stone resist cooling, then it is not going to be putting out enough heat to cook. Also, why not then use a slab of steel, it would hold more heat than ceramics???? A few 100kg of firebrick in a wood fired oven is the perfect pizza cooker, a couple of Kg of ceramic in a electric oven does nothing special – TFD Jan 25 '11 at 23:12
  • @TFD: I won't argue physics with you--you don't know it and aren't listening. – bikeboy389 Jan 26 '11 at 00:04
  • @bikeboy389 yeah right.... top quality comment! As I said, try it sometime! – TFD Jan 28 '11 at 04:04
  • OK, last try then. A simple test. Heat a stone and a thin tray to 500 degrees in the oven. Pull them out on the counter, put a pizza on each, and leave it. Which pizza will cook the most in 10 minutes? The one on the stone will cook more because there is more heat retained in the stone (thermal mass) that can be transferred to the pizza. If you can't grasp this, I can't help you. Even in the oven, your tray with no thermal mass will cool from the pizza and require reheating by convection (slow), while the stone can reheat the surface touching the pizza by conduction (fast). – bikeboy389 Jan 29 '11 at 15:27
  • @bikeboy Yes of course a stone will be hotter for longer than a tray out of the oven. But that's apples to oranges. How about a slab of steel the same weight as the stone? The stone in the oven holds more heat than a then steel tray than a piece of thin steel. The thin steel conducts heat nearly instantly. i.e. at the rate the oven can produce radiant heat, while the stone will take long time to recover to max temperature, and hence makes no real difference to the base of the pizza other than moisture absorption. You would need 10's of kG of stone to make a real difference – TFD Jan 31 '11 at 01:21
  • @bikeboy A quick google of "pizza stone" gives the main reasons "even heat distribution across the pizza base" and "extraction of moisture". The first is debatable given normal radiant heat thermodynamics of an enclosed space, and the second is obvious given that's it's stone, but shouldn't be necessary if you make the dough right - it's just another marketing thing - someone makes a nice income selling something nobody really needs – TFD Jan 31 '11 at 01:28
  • @bikeboy Nathan Myhrvold's new book "Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking" specifically mentions thermal mass and suggests "Stick in a three-quarter-inch slab of steel, preheat as hot as the oven will go, and cook your pizza on the hot steel under the grill for two minutes or less" That's going to be 50kg of steel! Good luck on your domestic oven rack holding that :-) And how long does a domestic oven take to heat such a piece of steel (4kW electric compared to 20kW wood fire) – TFD Mar 31 '11 at 23:22
  • So at least you've been convinced of the efficacy of thermal mass to the process. Previously you completely discounted it, in favor of trays that have very little or none. Or are you suggesting that only steel has it, but ceramic doesn't? Or that there's no point in trying to use thermal mass if you can't use 50kg of steel? I'm a little lost, now that you seem to have shifted your argument. – bikeboy389 Apr 01 '11 at 13:13