About Peel & Flame

Who this is for

Someone who already makes pizza at home, reasonably often, and is not satisfied with the bottom of it. Not somebody looking up what a pizza stone is - we do not write the two-paragraph preamble explaining that, because our reader already owns one and wants to know whether the next thing is worth buying.

That focus is why the site is organized the way it is. Five of the six categories are about equipment; the sixth, Crust School, exists to work out which piece of equipment is actually your problem - and quite often the answer is that none of them is, and you should preheat for longer.

Why we compete on arithmetic

The ranking field for "best pizza stone" includes a real test kitchen with named testers, an instrumented protocol and decades of brand equity. We cannot imitate that honestly, and we are not going to try.

What we found instead is that almost nobody in this category publishes any working. The number you will meet everywhere - that steel conducts heat 18 times better than stone - is repeated so widely that it is treated as a fact, and it does not correspond to any ratio you can derive from published material constants. On at least one manufacturer's page the same 18 is used for conductivity and for stored thermal energy, which cannot both be true.

So we compiled the constants, ran the arithmetic, published the working and let readers check it. That produced findings the rest of the category does not have: that effusivity rather than conductivity is what decides bottom crust, that a quarter-inch steel is slightly slower to preheat than a 16-inch stone, and that bakeware cordierite runs about 20 percent less dense than the textbook figure. All of it is on the methodology page with the sources.

What we do not have

No test kitchen. No lab. No products sent to us by manufacturers, and none we would accept. No named credentials, no expert panel, no medical or culinary review board.

We publish that in the same breath as what we do, because the honest version reads better than the alternative - and because the alternative is a claim a competitor or a quality rater could falsify in an afternoon.

Who writes it

Scooter M. - An enthusiast who is genuinely into this. I read the manuals, compile the published specs, and do the math. No lab coat, no test kitchen, and no pizza stones in my cupboard that a manufacturer sent me.

That framing is deliberate and it is the honest one. Interest, not tenure. There is no claim here to years behind a stove, because the site is new and so is the byline. What there is instead is a method you can check. More about the byline.

Who owns it

Peel & Flame is operated by Slate Mill Group, which owns and runs a number of independent publishing properties. There is no external investor, no advertiser relationship and no manufacturer relationship of any kind.

The site is funded entirely by affiliate commission on products bought through its links. That, and nothing else - the full disclosure explains exactly how.

How to tell us we are wrong

info@peelandflame.com, or the contact form. We respond within five business days, and where you are right the page gets corrected with a dated note on it rather than a silent edit.

The claims we have banned ourselves from making are published in full on the editorial policy. Holding us to that list is fair game, and it is the reason it is public.