Old Stone Oven 14-Inch by 16-Inch Baking Stone at KitchenSensation.com

Professional pizza and traditional European bread ovens are often lined with stone or brick. This is so heat is stored up and redistributed evenly. The resulting blast of heat from the Old Stone Oven rectangular pizza stone gives bread and pizza a nice chewy crust. The rustic French tarts called galettes are also well suited to a baking stone. To use the stone, place it in a cold oven and preheat to 500 degrees for pizza, or according to the recipe for bread or galettes. The stone is made of the same material that lines blast furnaces and kilns, so it can handle ultra-high temperatures.

Wait until the baking stone is entirely cooled before attempting to clean it. Let it dry completely before using again. Some discoloration will occur over time; this is natural and will not affect baking. Using baking parchment may help delay that discoloration. Do not bake cookies, turnovers or other high-fat items on the stone; the stone would absorb the fat and proceed to produce smoke and bad odors. The stone comes with a flyer that contains detailed use and cleaning instructions, as well as recipes for bread, pizza dough, and two pizza toppings. --Garland Withers

Product Reviews
I've prided myself on my homemade pizza for years. It's something I take very seriously no matter if I am making my dough from scratch, or if time doesn't permit, using pre-made refridgerated dough. Now I've used all sorts of pizza pans to bake my pies from the round aluminum sheets, to the large round sheets with the holes in them, to the rectangular pans that pizzerias use for deep dish pizza. Bottom line is that none of them gave as true a pizzeria taste as this baking stone. What's more is that stone allows you to cook at hotter temperatures as my older oven always cooked faster on the bottom and I'd have to adjust the rack heighth. The stone allows for much more even cooking and provides a true gourmet tasting crust. I'll never go back to aluminum pans again. Great item and great value as well.