How to Use a Pizza Stone for the First Time

The routine, in order

1. Wipe it, do not wash it. A damp cloth, no soap, no soaking. Unglazed cordierite is porous and it will drink whatever you put on it, which then bakes out as smoke and smell. If it arrived dusty, a dry brush and a damp wipe is the whole job.
2. Let it dry completely before its first heat. Overnight if you washed it at all. Water trapped in the pores turns to steam, and steam expanding inside a ceramic body is one of the two ways new stones break.
3. Put it in a cold oven, on the rack you intend to use. Lower-middle for pizza. Leave at least an inch of clearance to the oven walls so air can move around it - a stone wedged in tight bakes unevenly and blocks the convection that browns the top.
4. Heat the oven and the stone together, to the oven's maximum, and give it 25 to 45 minutes past the point the oven says it is ready. The oven reaches temperature long before the stone does; that gap is the single most common reason a first pizza disappoints.
5. Check the surface if you can. An infrared thermometer pointed at the stone tells you the one number that matters. Without one, use time: 25 minutes past the preheat beep for a 15 mm stone, 40 for a three-quarter-inch one.
6. Launch, bake, and leave the stone in. Do not take a hot stone out to put the next pizza on. Slide the baked pizza off with a thin peel and leave the stone where it is.

The two mistakes that break new stones

Putting a cold stone into a hot oven. The face nearest the element expands before the rest of the body does, and cordierite is strong in compression and weak in tension. Always start the stone in a cold oven.

Putting a hot stone onto a cold counter, or anything cold onto a hot stone. Same mechanism in reverse. That includes frozen pizza dropped straight onto a preheated stone, which is a genuinely common way to hear a crack.

Things you do not need to do

Season it. Oil on ceramic soaks in, does not polymerize usefully, and eventually smokes or goes rancid.

Soak it. This advice circulates and it is the opposite of correct. Water in the pores becomes steam.

Line it with foil or parchment for the whole bake. Both put a layer between the base and the stone, which forfeits the contact that is the entire reason you bought it. Parchment for the first 90 seconds to make a launch survivable is a fair compromise; leaving it there for six minutes is not.

Worry about the staining. It will go brown and then black in patches within a few bakes. That is normal, permanent, and has no effect on how it works. More on that in cleaning a stone.

Flour, semolina, and what actually burns

Whatever you launch on ends up on the stone. Plain flour burns quickly and smokes; semolina and fine cornmeal are coarser, roll under the base like tiny bearings, and take longer to scorch. Use as little as will let the base slide - a shake of the peel before launching tells you whether you have enough.

A perforated peel drops most of the excess before the pizza leaves, which is why it is the first thing we would buy alongside a stone.