Lesley Stockton is a writer focused on kitchen and entertaining. Her coverage includes grilling, kitchen knives, and cookware, just to name a few.
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A pizza stone is the best tool for baking up crispy pies that’ll rival those made by your favorite restaurant, but it can also do so much more. After making more than 50 pizzas, 24 flaky croissants, and 10 loaves of rustic bread on four stones and two baking steels, we think the FibraMent-D Home Oven Baking Stone is the best all-purpose stone for preparing crisp pizza, crusty bread, and golden pastries.
Everything we recommend
Top pick
The FibraMent-D baking stone is the best and most versatile stone we tested. This ¾-inch-thick ceramic slab holds enough heat to bake multiple pro-quality pizzas back-to-back. And its coarse surface yields crispy bottoms and puffy crusts. But near-perfect pizza isn’t the only reason we chose the FibraMent stone as our top pick. It’s an all-purpose baking surface that can help you make airy croissants, light flaky biscuits, and pies with golden bottom crusts. FibraMent also offers the most size options of all our picks.
Also great
Best for pizza
This thick steel slab will have you turning out pizzas that rival your favorite brick-oven spot.
If you want the best possible chance at creating a pizza with the black-spotted crust of a brick-oven Neapolitan pie, the ⅜-inch-thick Modernist Cuisine Baking Steel is your best bet. It conducts heat better than any ceramic stone we tested, yielding pizzas with dark and puffy crusts. And unlike the FibraMent, this durable steel plate is safe to use under any broiler and on the grill. But even though the Baking Steel is our favorite for pizza, it gives off too much intense heat for baking bread and more-delicate baked goods, and it will scorch the bottoms of cookies or croissants. It also takes a lot of muscle to hoist this 23-pound slab of steel in and out of the oven.
Budget pick
This affordable all-purpose stone lets you bake pizza and bread with crispy golden crusts and is also good to grill.
If you’re an occasional baker or just interested in a more budget-friendly option, the Honey-Can-Do Rectangular Pizza Stone is a solid choice. (This used to be called the Old Stone Oven Rectangular Pizza Stone. A representative from Honey-Can-Do assured us that the stones are the same.) The pizzas we baked on this stone ranked third among the seven models we tested. They had a slightly paler, softer crust than pizzas we made with the Baking Steel or the FibraMent-D, though they were still delicious and satisfying. This stone also produced crusty bread loaves with springy crumb. And its gentler heat made it even better than the FibraMent for baking croissants, which turned out so uniformly golden you’d have thought they came from a professional bakery. Plus, this stone is safe to use on the grill or under a broiler.
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Why you should trust us
My culinary career started when I persuaded the kitchen manager at a brewpub to hire me as their in-house baker, despite having zero professional kitchen experience. Then I hustled my way into a vegetarian restaurant kitchen six months later, after embellishing my expertise in vegan pastry arts (I had none but quickly learned). Before I knew it, I was baking at two restaurants and a catering company to save money for culinary school. Since then I’ve worked in restaurants in three major cities, as well as in the test kitchens at Martha Stewart Living and Everyday Food, and written numerous guides for Wirecutter.
In addition to the knowledge I gained from my scrappy beginnings, I talked to baking expert Susan Reid, senior recipe developer for King Authur Baking; William M. Carty, PhD, a professor of ceramic engineering and materials science at the Inamori School of Engineering at Alfred University at the time of our interview; and Scott Misture, a professor of materials science and engineering, also at the Inamori School of Engineering. And I spent many hours scrolling through the extensive forums on The Fresh Loaf, Breadtopia, and Pizza Making to hear what home bakers have to say.
Who this is for
Anyone who bakes frequently or loves to make pizza at home can benefit from a baking stone or steel. If you’ve ever baked a pizza on a cookie sheet, you probably noticed the crust wasn’t as crisp and browned as a pizzeria pie. Like, not even close. That’s because A) your home oven can’t get as hot as a commercial one, and B) a cookie sheet is too thin to hold enough heat to produce a superbly browned pizza crust. A baking stone or steel can help.
If you tackle a vast array of baking projects, you’ll want an all-purpose stone that’ll suit most recipes.
A baking stone or steel won’t actually make your oven hotter, but it does store heat. When you bake bread or pizza directly on the hot surface, that concentrated warmth results in crustier breads and crispier pizzas with puffier “oven spring” (the expansion of dough during the first few minutes of baking) than you’d get from just hot oven air and a cookie sheet. Baking stones and steels also help stabilize the heat in your oven, which is especially helpful if your oven cycles through dramatic temperature fluctuations.
Whether you choose a stone or a steel depends on what you like to bake. If you tackle a vast array of baking projects, you’ll want an all-purpose stone that’ll suit most recipes. Ceramic stones are versatile because they conduct enough heat for a puffy oven rise, but they won’t blacken the bottoms of pastries, biscuits, cakes, and tarts. Baking a pie on a ceramic stone all but guarantees that you won’t end up with a soggy bottom crust ever again. Steel transfers too much heat for most baking projects and is generally best for pizza.
How we picked
Even though pizza stones and steels all seem the same—just a slab of material that gets hot—a number of factors can affect how well they perform. Here’s what we considered as we searched for the best ones:
Stone vs. steel
With the exception of a couple of models—one glazed stoneware and one made from a proprietary ceramic mix—we mainly focused on baking stones made from unglazed cordierite ceramic, and baking steels. Cordierite ceramic, a material commonly used in commercial bakery ovens, is great for baking stones because, as William Carty told us, “It’s rather insensitive to rapid changes in temperature” (so it won’t crack when you drop a cool piece of dough on the hot surface).
Ceramic stones are great for baking not only pizza and bread but also biscuits, scones, and tarts. Compared with steel, ceramic transfers heat more moderately and won’t torch the bottoms of delicate baked goods. Susan Reid, editor for Sift Magazine, bakes a lot on her stone: “Ninety percent of the time it lives in the oven on the middle shelf. I like baking pies on it. The ‘oomph’ of bottom heat helps keep the bottom crust from getting soggy.” (Note: Use only ceramic or metal pie plates. The hot stone could cause glass plates to shatter due to thermal shock.)
Baking steels, which are made from solid steel, deliver much more intense heat than ceramic. Scott Misture, professor of materials science, explained “The heat conduction in the steel is probably 100, 200, or 300 times faster … so that’s a dramatic difference”.
At ¼ to ½ inch thick, baking steels are also much thicker than a baking sheet or even a cast-iron pan, and therefore they hold a lot more heat. Ultra-thin-crust pizzas, like New York- and Neapolitan-style pies, bake very well on steel because the intense blast of heat is crucial to get proper browning and oven spring in a short amount of time. But steel heat is too intense for buttery pastries, as proven by a batch of black-bottomed croissants. The steel also scorched the bottoms of the bread we baked.
More heat isn’t always better, as the undersides of these bread loaves show. The Baking Steel (far left) burned the bottom of our loaf. The Honey-Can-Do(middle), and FibraMent-D loaves were golden, crisp, and puffy—everything we want fresh bread to be. Photo: Sarah Kobos
Size and shape
Size options are almost as important as what a baking stone or steel is made from, because ovens vary. You want as big a baking surface as possible, while still allowing for some airflow around your stone.
Rectangular stones are more versatile than round ones. A batch of baguettes or a baking sheet will fit on a rectangle. But on a 14-inch diameter circle? Not so easy. Even if you’re just interested in making pizza, you want as much surface area as possible to rotate and scoot the pie around so it bakes evenly. That said, if you have a tiny oven and your only option is a round stone, that’s fine. It’s better than nothing!
If you want a rectangular stone, make sure you get the right size baking stone or steel for your oven. Ovens and stones both vary, but a 30-inch stove should fit a 15-by-20-inch stone. Just make sure there’s a 1-inch gap between the stone and the oven walls on all sides, because it’s crucial for airflow in the oven. Good air circulation not only promotes even baking but also boosts your oven’s longevity and performance. If too much heat is trapped in the lower part of the oven, you run the risk of damaging electronic parts, like a gas oven ignition unit.
Thickness
There’s a sweet spot when it comes to stone and steel thickness. If it’s too thin, it won’t hold enough heat, especially for baking back-to-back pizzas. Too thick and it’ll take longer than two hours to preheat (and be more unwieldy to move). Depending on the season, that means that by the time the stone is ready, you could be stretching dough in an unbearably hot kitchen. We found the ideal thickness for stone to be ½ to ¾ inch, and ⅜ inch for steel.
A top-performing baking stone or steel is a hefty piece of cookware. If you’re worried about lifting your creations, stone is a good choice because it weighs significantly less than steel.
Surface texture
In our testing, we found that pizzas baked on stones with coarser surfaces were much browner, crisper, and puffier than ones we made on smoother stones. The pizza we made on a glazed stone turned out surprisingly golden, but the crust was limp and had the mouthfeel of a steamed bun. These results led us to theorize that surface texture affects the crust’s quality and texture. When we asked Carty, he agreed that our theory is plausible, saying, “A pizza dough that’s wet is going to have a tendency to adhere well to that smoother stone rather than a rougher stone. A rougher stone is going to create air pockets.” A craggier surface also creates pathways for steam to escape from under the dough.
Surface texture of a baking steel probably isn’t as important since it has higher conductivity than ceramic. But the baking steels we tested, while not as rough as our favorite stones, do have the coarse texture of a Lodge cast-iron skillet.
How we tested
Our first round of testing, and arguably the most important, focused on pizza. We preheated each stone and steel to 500 degrees, gauging the temperature with two oven thermometers placed directly on the stones. (Although not perfect or exact, this was the best way for us to see when the oven and stones were up to temperature.) We then baked three pizzas in succession on each model using homemade pizza dough.
We eliminated the stones and steels that produced pale, doughy pizzas. Some models failed on the first pie. Others made a great first pizza but couldn’t hold enough heat for multiple bakes, which is important for feeding a crowd.
After baking more than 20 pizzas, we disqualified over half the competition and moved onto bread. For this test, we used the King Arthur No-Knead Crusty White Bread recipe because it’s easy and forgiving, and the dough can live in the fridge for seven days. It’s also one of the few no-knead recipes we found that doesn’t require baking the bread in a Dutch oven. We proofed the loaves in a basket (called a banneton), then turned them onto a semolina-dusted pizza peel, and launched them onto the preheated stones and steel. The baking steel produced loaves with burnt bottoms, while the ceramic stones baked up uniformly golden bread.
We also made croissants (not from scratch, we don’t have time for that). Thankfully, Trader Joe’s sells frozen unbaked all-butter croissants. These pastries are mostly butter (because, French) and will burn at high temperatures. We baked them on the stones and steels with nothing but a thin layer of parchment in between. We suspected ceramic stones would do a better job than the baking steel—and we were right. The intense heat from the steel left us with black-bottomed croissants.
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