My pizza stone has been soaked in grease over time, which has sort of baked in. On the one hand, it’s rather like a "seasoned’ iron skillet. On the other hand, in a blistering hot oven, the stone goes in dry and clean but soon begins to ooze grease from somewhere inside it that I can’t get to, which sucks.
Is there any way to coax that grease out, ALL of it? I don’t know where it’s hiding… I leave the stone in a hot oven, unused, swab away the grease while it’s hot over and over, but it just keeps coming.
Is this just the way it is with pizza stones, or is there something weird with mine? (It wouldn’t be such a big issue if I only used it for pizza, but I like to use it for almost anything I want to get very brown and crisp…)
Just as an FYI, it is great for making absolutely slammin’ matzo. (My recipe isn’t kosher, I don’t think, since it’s flour, water, cracked pepper and sesame seeds.
Making it is a hot oven adventure, lemme tell ya, since you have to open the 450-500 degree oven about 60-80 times for one recipe: put it in, wait a minute, turn it, wait a minute, maybe turn it once more, take it out, put in another…you end up a little cooked yourself… but it’s delicious enough to make it worth it.
Instead of an actual pizza stone, I just bought a box of unglazed quarry tile at Home Depot. I rinse them in hot water and then line the oven rack with them–it takes four to do my tiny (24") oven. The cracks between the tiles make no difference whatsoever.
When they get nasty I just replace them. I think there were 36 in the box and it was less than $20. They seem to be hard to find sometimes, though.
The other nice thing is that if I’m doing a whole bunch of pizzas, I can line both oven racks with them.
Really? I did not know that, about not using soap. I have been scrubbing mine with SOS pads (after scraping off any larger stuck-on cheesey bits with a table knife) for quite a while now. I’ve never noticed any soapy flavor. I’ve also never notice any grease seeping out.
How else can I get the stuck-on bits off my pizza stone?
Mine’s about 5 years old, a cheap one I got at Trader Joe’s.
I have a dish scrubber I got from the dollar store, round nylon brush on a long handle, the tip is flat and thin like a spatula (only short). This is the only thing I use on my stone. Sometimes I skip the water and just brush off the crumbs, but for stuck on stuff, I use the scraper end of the scrubber under running water. If you need more friction I’d think a bit of salt and clear water would be ok
Okay… I am stunned. Seriously stunned. Blown away.:eek:
I put my seasoned stone in the oven and ran the self-clean.
:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:
Who stole my pizza stone and replaced it with a brand new one??? C’mon, who? And why are you messing with my mind?
I mean…:eek:
Wow.
If I hadn’t personally experienced the choking, burning, acrid smoke that heat-blasting that stone (and my oven in general, but it had never been that bad on just the oven alone) produced and burned my eyes with, I WOULD believe that the kitchen gadget fairies had come along and switched them out.
So that’s the answer. Self-clean cycle. Amazing. (But even that didn’t completely eliminate the grease stains on the inside glass, it just made them smaller, less sticky, and blacker. Bummer.)
While we’re on the subject, exactly how hot is the self-clean cycle? And why can’t I set it that hot myself? After all, real pizza ovens are something like 700-800 degrees, aren’t they?
Alton Brown has hesitantly mentioned using an oven’s self-cleaning cycle for such purposes, with the caveat that he can’t get any oven manufacturer to endorse it. (Not to mention that most ovens wouldn’t really let you do it.)
I had an oven that got up over 600 degrees when you pegged the dial. If you lined it with stones and gave it a good hour to pre-heat, it made the best pizza ever.
Meet Jeff Varasano, who had the same line of thinking and found a way to jerry-rig his oven’s self-cleaning cycle to produce some mighty awesome looking pizzas. (He says his oven tops out at around 975F in the self-cleaning cycle).
I don’t know about your ovens, but mine has a little lock lever you have to throw before the self-clean cycle engages. It is heat-actuated, meaning the oven is now locked until the temp is cool enough to open, which is usually below 200 degrees. Which means your pizza would also be trapped in there, and it will not be nice and hot when it comes out.
Accidentally threw that lever before I realized what it was, thinking it was a safety latch to prevent kids from getting in while the oven was on. Well, it is, sorta
Luckily, it was just some oven-bake french fries in there, but my daughter was not amused that she had to wait so long for them.
I have a pretty bitchen oven that I just bought about 18 months ago, pretty top-o-the-line (at least, the line that’s there before you cross over into Wolf territory) - it locks itself right at the start of the self-clean cycle. 4 hours and 25 minutes, I think.
I have a pizza stone that I bought about 20 years ago. I’ve never done anything more to it than scrape the bits off and run it under super hot water. So far so good on the food poisoning front.
My oven locks itself when you start the self clean cycle and wont unlock for around 4 hours. I can’t imagine that any pizza would be worth trying to eat after that!
