Make your own pizza stone for less than £1 + recipe thick pizza dough.

Salaam alaykum,

Before I became Muslim, I worked in a quite expensive Italian restaurant called Oceano. They had the best pizza ever, really. Most of the staff including the chefs where Italian, so all of the dishes had the real distinctive Italian taste you would expect from a good Italian restaurant. And guess what, the most popular pizza (Cafoncella) was made with raw ham! And I can tell you, it tasted delicious. I always craved to make a pizza base like that.

The first time I made my own pizza I was a little disappointed, it didn’t even came close to an Italian pizza! It looked more like an American style pizza base, no offense! There was really nothing crispy about it. I taught that it was the flour I used so I started to use a high gluten bread flour from Allinson. I searched for a recipe which used the same brand of flour. 

I found a recipe for pizza dough called The Ultimate Pizza Dough with a picture of a delicious and crispy looking pizza. I tried it. Good pizza, but it tasted more like bread and it wasn’t crispy at all! The flour tasted really good by the way. So if you like thick bases, here’s the recipe. This recipe is for 3-4 medium bases.

Ingredients

500g Strong white bread flour

½ tsp Salt

1 Sachet instant yeast

2 tbsp golden caster sugar

325 ml warm water

Preparation

• Put the flour and yeast and salt in a large bowl and mix together. Make a well in the centre of the mix.

• Stir the sugar into the warm water then add to the well in the centre of the dry mix.

• Work for the outer edge and mix all the dry ingredients into the water. When the mix has come together turn out on to a lightly floured surface and knead for about 10 minutes. At this stage the dough should be soft and spring back when lightly touched.

• Flour the dough and cover with cling and leave to rest for about 15 minutes.

• If not baking immediately leave the dough wrapped in lightly oiled cling film and palce in the fridge until you are ready to shape and bake.

• Divide the dough into 3 or 4 pieces depending on how many pizza bases you want to make.

• Taking one pieces at a time and roll out on a very lightly floured surface. Ideally the base should be 5mm thick but you can be creative on the shape. Why not try, oval, or square for a change! Place on a baking tray and leave the rolled bases for 15 to 30 minutes to rest. Meanwhile preheat the oven to 200C/fan 180 C/ gas mark 6.

• When ready to bake add your desired topping and bake for 7 to 8 minutes.

So after a not so long search I figured out that I needed a pizza stone. I looked online and find out that they where quite expensive. So after a while I found a few articles talking about how you can make your own pizza stone for under $3!

Basically you just need to buy unglazed quarry tiles which you can find in your local home depot store. It is really essential that they are unglazed because the glaze may contain lead, and that is not very healthy!

Quarry tiles have a terracotta or brownish colour and look like terracotta pots, they are probably the cheapest in the store, I found an 15 x 15cm for £0,08! You can find the tiles in different sizes but they usually come in 3 sizes:

15 x 15 cm

20 x 20 cm

30 x 30 cm

I found a store which has all three sizes.

So now it’s time to measure your oven. The tile needs to fit in your oven so that there is at least 2 cm space all the way around it.

My oven is 40 x 40 cm. So basically I can by one big tile of 30 x 30 cm or 4 of 15 x 15 cm and then I have 10 cm space al the way around the tile. And the best part is that it is only £0,32!

Using Your Homemade Pizza Stone

• When you get your stone home you will want to wash it thoroughly with water. Since the stone is porous it absorbs everything and soap flavoured pizza is simply disgusting! Always just rinse your stone when needed. Make sure it has cooled down thoroughly and then use warm water to rinse.

• Allow it to dry for several hours. It must be all the way dry or you run the risk of it cracking in the oven.

• Place the stone or stones in the cold oven making sure to leave at least 1" of airspace around the stones.

• Preheat the oven to the highest degree it can get with the stone in it. Allow to heat for about an hour.

• Use a paddle or rimless cookie sheet to slide your pizza onto the stone. If you roll your dough out on cornmeal it won't stick to the paddle.

Bake until done and then remove the pizza with the paddle.

You can bake all day on stored heat because the tiles stay warm all day!

Great isn’t it? So I’m going to try this out and tell you how it worked out!

By the way, the tiles look like this: