A pizza stone typically comes in handy for people that love cooking their pizza every once in a while! It aids your household oven in mimicking the impacts of a brick oven. This porous stone is great at absorbing and retaining heat evenly as well as getting rid of excessive moisture within the dough to achieve a perfectly crisp pizza crust. Still, having a stone comes with some extra care.
If you expect the stone to live a long life, then one of the things you need to learn is how to clean pizza stone. While you don’t have to clean it regularly, this stone is fragile and can crack very easily, so you need to be careful while handling it. I love preparing pizza a couple of times a week, and I typically give my pizza stone a quick clean each time I use it. So I think I know how to do it right. I have discussed the essential steps of the cleaning process in detail in this article, and I hope that my easy tips will be useful for you.
Why It’s Important to Clean Your Pizza Stone
A pizza stone is a great way to get a crispy crust on your homemade pizza. However, it’s important to keep your stone clean, or you risk ruining your pizzas and making them taste terrible. Over time, grease and food build-up can create a rancid smell that will permeate your pizzas, no matter how well you try to clean the stone.
Additionally, the build-up can cause the stone to smoke when it’s heated, giving your pizza an unpleasant flavor. If you don’t clean your stone regularly, you may also find that it’s harder to get the dough to stick and that it cooks unevenly. So be sure to give your stone a good scrubbing after each use, and it will serve you well for many pizzas to come.
The Best Way to Clean Pizza Stone
So, how do you clean your favorite pizza maker? What do you use, and what factors do you need to consider while cleaning? Here is a detailed guide to take you through the cleaning process.
How to Clean Pizza Stone After Use: The Detailed Process
Here is the procedure of cleaning your pizza stone with no soap and a sink full of water:
- Wet the stone’s surface under running hot water. Make sure to use very little water on the stone since you’re expected to dry it thoroughly before use or storage.
- Use a stone brush for efficiently scrubbing the stone.
- Use a damp rag for wiping away particles.
- Leave the stone outside to dry. Alternatively, you can use a dry clean towel.
- Note that water may not be needed at all if you can use a brush first to sweep away all the food scraps. While water may help in loosening food, you don’t need it.
- Once the stone is dry, store it inside the oven to reduce the likelihood of breakage, if between uses. Besides, you can season it each time you’re using the oven. However, it might take a longer time to heat the oven.
What Does One Use for Cleaning a Stone
You already know that the stone is leveled and normally created using porous materials like ceramic. Therefore, you will notice that it absorbs any substance used to wash it, and that can impact the taste of your food. Besides, excessive moisture will have an effect on the texture of the pizza crust. While heating your pizza, the stone ingests water from the dough, creating a crispier crust. So, assuming that there is moisture trapped in your pizza cooker, it cannot cook that incredible crust.
It is very important to ensure that the stone cools down before getting to the actual cleaning process. It can trap heat, so you should prevent burning yourself or dropping it on the floor. Everything that is needed to clean your stone is in your home. The tool used have to be thin for easy sliding under stubborn food scraps, or you can use an abrasive item for scrubbing away any dirt left.
Tools commonly used for cleaning a pizza stone include a brush, scrubbing pad, spatula, blunts knife, sandpaper. You may need to use one or several of them. A couple of these items could scratch your pizza stone, so only utilize them if you have no other way to scrape off scorched or stuck food items. Also, make sure to never utilize chemicals for cleaning or soap. Not unless you like soapy pizza! So, what liquid is safe for cleaning the stone? You can moderately use water.
How to Keep Your Stone Safe
Water is the only thing to use for cleaning the stone. Still, a paste of vinegar and sodium bicarbonate can also be used for cleaning. But you should avoid using chemicals, oils or soap. Your stone will become non-stick as a result of the oils coming from the cooked foods, naturally building in the pizza stone.
Letting your stone get extremely wet, however, prevents the stone from baking the pizza crust as desired. Rather, your pizza stone needs to be entirely dry before cooking with it. If you have to, you can use a damp cloth for sweeping away the crumbs. Still, ensure that the pizza stone is dry later on. It is not recommended to use your oven for drying the stone since the water held inside the stone could lead to cracking.
Cleaning Stains on Your Stone
Stains remind you of so much. Imagine all the amazing pizzas you’ve made on this stone. They are normal elements of the stone, and there is no need to get rid of these stains. Not unless you’re tired of seeing them. But if you decide to eliminate them, you should follow these steps.
- Scrub away food items using a scrubber or a spatula.
- Create a paste containing equal measurements of sodium bicarbonate and water.
- Put it on the stains and scrub them using a brush to work the mixture round and round until you get rid of all of them.
- Use damp clothing to wipe the surface.
- Let your pizza cooker dry completely.
- To clean grease stains, use the same mixture to cover the spots and leave it for a couple of minutes.
- Then, use a brush for scrubbing, and a wet piece of clothing for wiping down. Baking soda is good for cleaning stains, and it has no impact on the taste of the pizza, unlike using soap,
It is important to note that it’s fine if you have dark stains and there is no need to clean them. The darker the stone, the less it sticks, and the higher the seasoning. So, don’t stress over those stains and be proud of them.
Cleaning a Burned Stone
If there are stubborn food scraps that your brush is unable to eliminate, then you can use some deep cleaning, putting the stone inside the oven. So, how do you go about it? Here’s the process:
- Set cooking oven to 500 °F.
- Put stone inside the oven’s top rack.
- Let it stay baking for approximately 60 minutes
- Check your stone and see if there are formation and popping of grease bubbles.
- Once the bubbles stop, begin the cycle of auto-cleaning. Excessive smoke might be produced if the stone is too dirty, and the food scraps will burn off. Once you complete the cycle, let your oven cool.
- Once it cools down, remove your stone, and utilize a clean rag for wiping it down.
- If the heat fails to wash it, use sandpaper for sanding down the crumbs.
Cleaning a Stone with Mold
Once a pizza stone is subject to excessive moisture, it can become moldy. For mold to thrive, there has to be moisture. So, how can you eliminate the mold on your favorite pizza cooker? You can utilize a paste of vinegar and sodium bicarbonate. Here’s how to go about it:
- To create a mixture, blend several drops of vinegar with a tablespoon of sodium bicarbonate.
- Use a scrubber to scrub the mixture onto the mold.
- Use a wet rag for cleaning the stone.
You can also use this mixture to eliminate stains. However, if this technique does not work, you will have to throw away your favorite pizza stone and purchase another one. Even though the majority of molds can’t survive temperatures over 140 °F, it is risky to bake with a stone filled with molds. Molds are dangerous to our health.
Although such substances like tea tree oil, detergent, or bleach can easily kill mold, I don’t recommend you apply them on your pizza stone. As I said, a stone is normally rather porous, so it is capable of absorbing any chemicals put on it; yet, some of these chemicals capable of destroying mold are hazardous.
Cleaning Your Pizza Stone Easily
Your stone is a useful item that you use to make pizzas. Although there is no need to clean the pizza stone regularly, if you decide to do it, you take this process seriously. Pizza stones are fragile, so you should be very careful handling them. I have given use some tips on how to clean your pizza stone the right way. With these steps, you can now clean your stone without any stress and go back to preparing and enjoying delicious pizzas.
How do you clean your pizza stone? Do you have any particular tips that you make use of, which you’d like me to know? What always works for you? What doesn’t? I would love to hear all your comments and feel free to ask any questions. You can leave all your comments and questions in the comment section below.
