Everybody has an opinion on which pizza stone is best. Food and Wine magazine says it's the Fibrament stone ($53). Cook's Illustrated recommends the Old Stone Oven pizza baking stone ($29.99). And your neighbor probably uses the Pampered Chef baking stone.
But if you do a little more research, and you'll find that pizza stones have a habit of cracking. Some last decades without a problem. Others last only days. And there doesn't seem to be any correlation between how expensive the stone is, what it's made of, or how carefully you handle and clean it, to how long the stone lasts.
That's what sent me looking for a reliable alternative to the traditional pizza stone. I love making homemade pizza But like all home cooks, I didn't want to buy something that was only good for one kitchen task.
I wanted some assurance that this pizza stone would be worth my investment (i.e., it wouldn't crack after the first use). And I wanted something that wouldn't require me to buy a whole host of accessories, such as a pizza peel, in order to use.
The Best Pizza Stone on the Market
Impossible dreaming? Not at all. Turns out the best pizza baking stone on the market isn't a pizza stone at all. It's a 14" cast iron enamed pan made by Copco cookware and sold under the Mario Batali Italian Kitchen brand name.
Cast iron is a wonderful conductor of heat -- it cooks quickly and evenly. And the persimmon enameled exterior is really quite attractive. The Mario Batali pan doesn't require any seasoning, so you can just give it a quick rinse and use it immediately.
Mario Batali Pan Passes the Test
My first test was my favorite shrimp and spinach pesto pizza. I was delighted to be able to roast the shrimp on the Mario Batali pan, then build the pizza on a silicone mat on my kitchen counter, and bake it using the same Batali pizza pan without needing to clean up in between.
The result was a crispy, evenly-browned crust, the kind normally reserved only for brick oven pizza from a restaurant.
The handles on the Batali pan are an improvement over traditional pizza stones, too. You can lift your pizza right out of the oven and serve it directly from the Batali pan. It's pretty enough to sit right on the table, and there's no need to use a pizza peel to remove your pizza from a stone.
But, as they say on the late-night infomercials, that's not all! This cast iron pan has so many other uses. Copco advertises it as a griddle for pancakes, crepes and bacon.
But the best use I've found for this pan is roasting everything from shrimp to vegetables in the oven. You can make roasted green beans, roasted garbanzo beans, sweet potato fries, beet chips, whatever you like, at 400 degrees or more, without having to worry about uneven cooking or your sheet pan buckling.
You can buy the Mario Batali pan at Sur La Table and Amazon. I recommend getting the cast iron-safe Batali pizza wheel, too. I wouldn't use a regular pizza cutter on this cast iron pan.
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