The Best Baking Stones and Steels

Pizzas emerged perfectly browned and crisp on the outside, with a tender interior, as if they were baked in a professional pizza oven. The steel also provided excellent oven spring to make our rustic bread loaf rise tall and develop a deeply browned, crackly chewy crust. While it’s a beast to lift, being absolutely flat with no handholds (but also no cutouts that waste space), this steel is tough and will last forever, providing easy cleanup—just keep it dry and oil it lightly after washing, as you would a carbon-steel or cast-iron skillet.

This steel did an excellent job browning our pizza crust uniformly while leaving the interior tender and moist. It’s heavy, at 16 pounds, and very flat, so it’s hard to pick up and transfer into the oven, though two corners have cutout circles designed to help lift it (or to hang it on the wall), which we didn’t find particularly helpful. Otherwise, this tough, unbreakable steel is a great choice for home pizza making or bread baking.

This baking steel performed and handled very similarly to our top choices. It turned out beautiful breads and pizzas with well-browned bottoms and moist, tender interiors. It was slightly larger than our two top models, giving us a little extra room for the foods we cooked on it. And it was a touch lighter, too, though still heavy enough that it was hard to move it in and out of the oven.

Supereasy to handle, compact to store, and a great boon for those who can’t lift heavy objects, these four lightweight 7.5-inch-square ceramic tiles (each weighing less than 1.5 pounds) are also inexpensive. (Note: You don’t have to fuss with arranging them. Just push them together on an oven rack; nothing falls between the cracks.) While they lack the mass of a thick ceramic stone, they still produced nicely browned, crisp pizza that was just a shade more chewy than the pizza we got from baking on steel or thick, heavy stone. From our temperature monitoring, we saw that the tiles were fully preheated to 500 degrees in just 30 minutes compared with the full hour it took the rest of the lineup. We liked their versatility: Two tiles would fit in most toaster ovens, or you could set all four in a row to bake long breads in the full-size oven.

This moderately priced ceramic stone produced a beautifully browned pizza crust with bubbly cheese. It was also fairly lightweight, making it easier to handle than most of the other models we tested. Though it lacked raised feet or handles, it provided an uninterrupted flat surface with plenty of room for baking larger pizzas and breads. While the pizza crust it produced was a shade chewier and drier than the crust produced on a steel, the results were still excellent.

The “pro” version of one of our winners, this baking steel was slightly larger, more than twice as thick, and significantly heavier. Weighing just over 27 pounds—11 pounds more than any other model we tested—this steel was a true pain to wrangle in and out of the oven. But that extra size conferred some advantages, too: It gave us a bit more room for baking, so we could make several baguettes at a time or larger pizzas. And because it was so thick and heavy, it had better heat retention than the other steels. As a result, we didn’t have to wait as long for the steel to heat back up between pizzas or batches of bread when baking several in sequence. Everything we baked on it turned out beautifully, though no better than foods cooked on thinner, lighter steels. It’s a great option for those who’d like a bigger steel, or who really want to speed up their baking or pizza-making—and don’t mind the heftier price and weight. 

With raised flaps on each end that serve as handles and a moderate weight, this stone is easier to handle than many others in the lineup, but the flaps take up a bit of available surface area for baking. Pizza and bread emerged nicely browned and crisp though slightly less airy and a bit drier than crust baked on steel slabs.

One of the heaviest models in the lineup, at 16 pounds and an inch thick, with no handles or raised feet, this big square stone was a beast to lift and transfer into the oven. Its weight and thickness also meant that it retained a lot of heat, so it recovered heat a bit more quickly after a pizza was dropped onto its surface compared with other models, but we saw no clear difference in the resulting pizza. Made of a faster-conducting mullite ceramic instead of cordierite ceramic like the other stones, it made good pizza and bread and offered plenty of uninterrupted space since it was 16 by 16 inches. Like other stones, its pizza was just slightly drier and chewier than the steel-baked pizza but was still completely acceptable, browned, and bubbly.

A thick spiral design on the underside of this ceramic stone promised to help it spread heat more evenly, but we didn’t see any evidence of it performing better than the other stones. The spiral did serve to raise the thick surface off the countertop, helping give us a handhold on the 13-pound slab. It produced nicely browned pizza (and crusty bread), though we found the pizza crust very slightly drier and chewier than the pizza made on the steel models.