The Most Important Thing To Know Before Cleaning Your Pizza Stone

If you've read up on tips to make homemade pizza, perfected the art of creating the perfect pizza dough, and even make your own sauce from scratch, then you need to invest in a pizza stone. These nifty round or rectangular slabs help to cook the pie evenly and crisp the crust, and they can even shorten the baking time thanks to their superior heat distribution. But if you're hoping you can wash your stone with soap and water — or even stick it in the dishwasher — you are, unfortunately, quite wrong. 

Because pizza stones are typically made of clay, ceramic, or cordierite mineral, the surface is porous and absorbent, meaning that whatever chemicals are in your dish soap can stick around inside the stone. That means the next time you go to bake a pizza on it, some of the residue could very well transfer into the pie and affect how your dough tastes. Do you want your next pizza to taste like green apple dish soap? Didn't think so. All you need for a basic maintenance cleaning after each use is a clean, damp dish towel to wipe away anything that remains on the stone. Any caked-on pieces of dough or cheese can be removed by a designated putty knife or kitchen scraper.

Pizza stones might also get stained with grease, but this shouldn't damage their effectiveness or cause issues with your pies. In other words, you don't actually have to remove these stains from your stone, but if you want to for aesthetic reasons, you should do so carefully. That means not using anything too scratchy (like a steel wool scrubber) and still laying off the dish soap and the water. Instead, you can make a gentler paste out of vinegar and baking soda and let it sit over the stains for no more than 10 minutes, then wipe the paste away with a moistened dish towel.

A few other things to avoid when cleaning your pizza stone: First, don't go to clean it while it's still hot. These tools obviously get pretty warm in the oven, so you could burn yourself if you don't wait for it to cool down entirely before cleaning it, not to mention a hot stone can crack from temperature shock in cool water. What you also don't want to do, either for regular cleaning or to remove stains, is soak your pizza stone in water. As mentioned, the stone is super porous, and soaking it will flood those pores, meaning the stone won't heat up or work as well next time you use it.