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My family loves pizza! It is a perfect go-to meal. My secret to great pizza is a 12” brick tile I got at Lowes. It probably seems a little bit strange, but it works.
All you need to get is a cheap, unglazed 12″ brick tile from the garden section of your local home improvement store. Make sure it is unglazed to avoid chemicals. It is also a good idea to thoroughly wash it and pre-bake it before you use it. You can also cover it with parchment paper or aluminum foil if you are concerned.
If you don’t have heating coils on the floor of your oven, then you can just put the tile directly on the oven floor. If you do have an electric heating coil on the floor, then put the tile on a rack on the lowest shelf right above the heating element.
The best reasons to put a big, flat brick in your oven and leave it there all the time:
-It’s really cheap. They are currently available at Lowe’s for $1.57.
-It functions as an incredibly efficient pizza stone.
-The earthen material absorbs and radiates the heat of your oven. The metal walls of your oven don’t absorb and radiate heat nearly as well as earthen materials do; metal conducts heat. This means that food will be heated more evenly than it would be in an oven without any earthen material.
I bought the stone so that I could bake pizza using this recipe. You could use any store-bought or homemade pizza with the brick tile. The best part is that baking on a brick tile will cook dough significantly better than metal sheet pans, or even, in my opinion many store-bought pizza stones.
To cook pizza, you will preheat your brick tile in your oven on its highest setting for half an hour, then use a pizza peel to slide your raw pizza on the tile for 5-10 minutes. Yes, that’s a lot of heat. In the summer it makes me cringe a little, but it’s great in the winter.
Homemade pizza is cheap to make, it’s fun to make with your kids (my girls love to help top the pizza), and it’s delicious. The secret to our family’s homemade pizza is the brick tile. Your friends may think it’s weird until they eat your perfectly baked pizza.
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