Apr 06 2009
How to make a baking stone on the cheap
I’ve been on a quest for some time now to get a baking stone for making nice crusty bread in our domestic oven. Most of the baking stones to buy are small and expensive, particularly the ones branded as “pizza stones”, which are actually circular and so of limited practical use for long loaves.
A few people sell more conventionally-shaped slabs of stone for your oven, but they are still awfully pricy. (I found one at a garden centre for thirty pounds. For some reason it’s always the garden centres that sell these things.) Until last week, when I stumbled across an alternative: a “worktop saver”.
Now, I honestly don’t know what a worktop saver is. They seem to be made of glass or stone. You can’t use them to put hot pans on, because the thermal shock would do for them pretty quickly. And I can’t imagine anyone using them as a chopping board unless they wanted to blunt their knives in short order.
But whatever the original purpose of these things, you can get a lump of granite about the same dimensions as the inside of an oven for between ten and twenty pounds. The one I bought was £20 from Debenhams because Asda didn’t have any £10 ones in stock. These things are ubiquitous, if you just know what to look for. (Curiously, I’m not the only one to delight in these things — they are useful for stabilising hi-fi equipment.)
I haven’t used mine extensively yet (a few pizzas in one baking session) but it’s holding up fine so far. I was careful not to put it cold into a hot oven, and it takes longer to come up to temperature, but it works well and radiates a lot of heat even when the oven is cooling.
Do it yourself
If you buy a granite worktop saver like mine you’ll probably need to prepare it first. Mine came with six foam-rubber feet on the unpolished side. I cut these off with a pen knife and then sanded down the remaining residue with the coarsest sandpaper I had. You’ll probably find that the unpolished side has very obvious grooves — presumably from where the stone was cut — and scraping/sanding along these ruts makes your job a bit easier.
Give it a quick once-over with a damp cloth to remove the dust and leave it to dry. I have used the stone polished-side up though I will probably try it upside down in future. The marks from the feet are still there, and very obvious when the stone is wet, but there is no smell of burning foam so I’m quite happy!
6 Responses to “How to make a baking stone on the cheap”
do you put the bread straight on the stone or do you have to grease it/ flour it use a baking tin or what
The bread just slides straight onto the stone. (Obviously this doesn’t apply when making stuff in loaf tins.) Previously I used a baking sheet that I would keep in the oven to preheat, but it had a hideously inappropriate specific heat capacity and would lose a lot of heat even when opening the oven door. (The first time I used one of our thick baking trays I was astounded how long it kept the heat even outside the oven, but there’s a lot more metal in those things.)
Now I tend to construct the bread on a cold baking sheet (lightly covered in semolina for its lubricating properties) and slide the loaves onto the bare stone in one smooth (ahem) motion. After a few rounds of baking in one go this does mean that the semolina builds up a bit in the oven, and the air is filled with the smell of burning flour. So I try to keep my semolina use to a minimum, but Helen would have you believe that I use it like confetti, throwing it lavishly round the room and glorying in some decadent baking rite. It’s not true! It’s just the kind of stuff that gets everywhere, like Christmas tree needles that turn up in your picnic blanket in July…
Funny, I found a huge cache of pine needles today.
So what difference does it actually make? (I mean the stone, not the pine needles)
I planted those pine needles there in order to make my comment seem more prescient…
I’m not sure what ultimate difference the stone will have. So far it has the effect of making the oven take longer to heat up and much longer to cool down. ;-) I hope that it will also give me a nice hot surface for creating a good crust on. I haven’t been baking much lately, though. However tonight I have a large batch — largest yet — on the go so we shall see soon enough.
time on your hands, then?
It’s the vista effect. It prevents effective computing.
A preheated baking stone provides the thermal umph required to expand the gas bubbles in your bread dough as fast as possible in the first few minutes while the bread is still flexible enough to rise. This makes for lighter bread.