Much as we love them for making our homemade pizza crispy, airy, and deeply browned, baking (a.k.a. pizza) stones have a fatal flaw: Made of ceramic, they can crack or break into pieces. This is one reason we slightly prefer a baking steel to a stone, since you’d be hard-pressed to shatter a 15-pound slab of steel.
That said, if you’re using a stone and baking gorgeous pizzas, there are a few things to know to help prevent it from cracking or breaking.