wrote in news:1135806418.906095.216290
@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com:

> Hi,
>
> I have today cooked myself my first homemade pizza and apart from the
> fact i used wholemeal flour (which turned out quite nice) and it was
> baked on a rectangular baking tray i have to say they turned out very
> nice.
>
> Anyway, I would like to invest in a pizza stone so first of all what is
> the best type - marbel or granite (dont know if granite is the most
> common but it we have many qranite quarries here in Scotland)?
>
> Also, how is a stone supposed to be cleaned? I have read some articles
> and it seems a bit of a chore. Any tips?
>
> Cheers
>

Measure your oven, goto a home center, buy an unglazed floor tile large
enough to fit in your oven. This will be much cheaper than those things
labelled as a pizza stone and will work the same. If your oven has a hard
time cooking things evenly, leave it in full time. My oven was horrible,
now it is a dream with a $5 floor tile. Cleaning, never had to clean
mine.

Another tip for making a good pizza is to set your oven to its highest
setting usually 500 and leave it there for an 1/2 to 1 hour to fully
preheat the oven, then bake the pizza. This allows the heat to fully soak
into the oven and when you place a cold pizza in the oven it will recover
quicker. Shoving it in after the light goes out indicating it has reached
temperature is not the way to preheat an oven for pizza.


This site says 1 hr which is what I do.

http://www.pizzatherapy.com/tipsand.htm

Naysayers may disagree with the amount of preheat time. Try it for
yourself and report on your results.

--
---
Charles Quinn

"Choosing the lesser of two evils, is still choosing evil" - Jerry Garcia