The Best Pizza Stones, Period (A Buying Guide)

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Pizza stones – the best way to get PERFECT pizza at home? They just might be. Picking up a quality pizza stone may be one of the best kitchen investments you can make. They are durable, versatile, and damn good at making pizza!

With a quality pizza stone, you can be sure that your pizza crust is as browned and crispy as the best pizzerias around with a fraction of the cost of eating out. Don’t just take our word for it either! Check out our top picks for 2023, as well as our buyers guide so you can make an informed choice yourself.

Our Favorite Pizza Stones This Year

Pizza Stone Buying Guide (Updated For 2023)

Pizza stones are one of the best investments you can have in your kitchen. Making delicious pizza is just the tip of the iceberg when you bring one of these babies into your kitchen. Since it’s such an important purchase, you want to make sure you are doing the work as a customer and picking the perfect one.

Well, let’s just say that there is NEVER a perfect tool for every person, but hopefully, with this buyer’s guide, you can find the perfect one for you and your needs. Let’s dive into it!

What Is A Pizza Stone?

A pizza stone is a piece of stoneware that you pre-heat and bake things on. Compared to a pizza pan, a stone is usually thicker and isn’t made of metal (with one possible exception). Where a pizza pan typically has prep involved, a pizza stone is primarily concerned with getting as hot as possible and transferring that heat to the crust. For the same reason people use pizza stones for pizza, they also work well for a ton of other foods and recipes in the kitchen.

The Three Types Of Pizza Stones:

Without a doubt, the material that your stone is made with is the most important factor when deciding on which one to get. Unlike pizza pans, there is much less variety when it comes to stone materials, so we don’t have to worry about getting bogged down with infinite choices between 30 different metals. Let’s go through each material type and talk about their benefits.

Clay and ceramic are essentially the same thing in the pizza stone world. Clay and ceramic stones are made from naturally occurring materials and have been used worldwide for thousands of years. Nowadays, they are some of the most common materials to be found in the kitchen.

Clay is cheaper than most other materials but still prized for its ability to retain heat. Its major drawback is that it is somewhat breakable (if you drop it), and it is susceptible to thermal shock (rapid temperature changes). To guard against thermal shock, simply place your stone in the oven as it’s preheating.

Cordierite is the second most common pizza stones you are likely to see. We have a few of them listed, and that’s because they make great additions to your cooking set. Cordierite is a mineral that resembles clay, but makes up for the few drawbacks that clay usually has.

For example, thermal shock isn’t really an issue with cordierite, so if you are afraid of cracking a stone (or have done it in the past), cordierite is a bit of insurance against that. However, they are a touch more expensive than clay, so be ready to pay a bit for that safety.

Finally, we have steel. Pizza steels are like a gray area in the middle of pans and stones. They aren’t technically pans because they are thick and act as stones, but they aren’t stones either (they’re metal). All in all, a thick pizza steel is the best product you can buy for homemade pizza.

It’s ridiculously durable (it’s literally a sheet of metal) and will last multiple lifetimes. It’s 20x more conductive than stone, meaning that it transfers heat to whatever it touches much faster and more efficiently. Pizza steels are prized for their ability to get perfectly browned crust as you see in much more expensive industrial and pizza ovens. The only drawback they really have is their price, but you get what you pay for.

Why Use A Pizza Stone?

At the end of the day, I guess it does just boil down to “why?” right? You, the consumer, don’t need anything taking up extra room in your kitchen. It’s already full of borderline useless things; why bring a literal rock into the mix? Great question! I hope to do stones justice in my answer.

Here’s our promise:

If you are making pizza at home, the best way to get good crust that has a browned bottom and good crumb is to use a pizza stone.

You can pretend that your soggy pizza is ok and you can pretend that you don’t mind ordering out whenever you want decent pizza, but we know the real truth. If you truly want good pizza at home, a stone is the first place to start. Here’s why they work.

The Science Behind Pizza Stones

You need to think about two factors when trying to get good crust: Heat and Moisture. If you can get high temperatures (with direct contact to the crust) and low moisture, you can get great crust. Let’s deal with the heat side of things first.

If you’ve ever stuck your hand into a 250-degree oven, you know that it’s rather hot. The strange thing is that you can still place your hand inside the area without any problems. If you tried to do the same thing with a pot of 212-degree water, however, you would be in trouble (and seriously scalded).

It all has to do with conduction and convection. Conduction is the transfer of heat through touching, convection is the transfer of heat through a liquid or gas. Conduction works WAY better for getting things hotter, faster. A pizza stone is a conductor that increases the amount of thermal energy (heat) that is transferred to your pizza crust. The more energy conducted, the browner and crispier the crust.

The second feature that stones have is their porousness. You can’t really see it, but clay is porous (water can move through it). When you heat it and place dough on it, water can evaporate through the porous structure and away from your dough, i.e., a crispier crust.

We’ve mentioned this article before, but if you want an in-depth look at why pizza stones and steels are so good at what they do, check out this link. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt has been testing food and cookware for years and goes incredibly in-depth with his research. If it’s any consolation, his personal choice between stones is a pizza steel because of how well it conducts heat.

Why Pizza Stones Are Incredibly Versatile

Even though we call them “pizza stones,” humans have been using slabs of stone for cooking forever. When considering purchasing a stone, it’s important to realize just what kinds of things you can do with it! It would be a shame to keep an incredible piece of equipment locked away in a drawer when it could be used to better your food weekly.

The same things that help a stone cook pizza dough are what makes them good with bread. A soggy, pale bottom on a freshly baked piece of bread is a real travesty. Using a pizza stone can help bread rise better and give it a crust deserving of all the “thump-testing” you can imagine.

Apart from baking, stones can be used to roast! Whether it’s vegetables or meat, the heat retention, and heat conduction really help give roasted foods a head start. I suppose you could stick to using that old baking sheet for all your oven-roasting, but a stone gives food that extra nudge with its high-temp and heat retention.

Conclusion

We hope you enjoyed learning WAY more about pizza stones than you ever would have expected! To sum up everything we know about picking a good stone, you should be looking for something that fits your kitchen and conducts heat well.

If you are looking to save a bit of money, a clay stone will do wonders for all your pizza endeavors. If you are trying to get something a touch nicer but don’t want to seriously shell out, cordierite is the way to go. And finally, for all those who want the best of the best and are willing to pay for it, go ahead and grab that pizza steel!