(Cross-posted from the Pizza Blog)

We received a pizza stone for Christmas - one of several kitchen related presents from my parents. We were going to use it for our first post-Christmas pizza but it needed a couple of washes and a while in the oven to drive off the fumes (presumably from manufacturing), so it wasn't ready at the time of our previous post.

The pizza shown here had the rest of the home-made spicy tomato sauce, mixed with red pesto because there wasn't enough left for 2 pizzas. The toppings were sliced courgette, anchovies, capers, grated cheddar and parmesan, and mozzarella. For the meat I had a selection from a Marks & Spencers Christmas pack which contained sausage, stuffing flavoured meatballs and rolled bacon. Emma had a selection of M&S 'party food' chicken pieces.

The stone needed heating up first - we placed it in a cold oven and slowly let it come to temperature, giving it at least half an hour before we used it. We had to make our pizzas one at a time, taking the stone out of the oven, quickly assembling the pizza, then putting it in the oven to cook.

Heston Blumenthal, the chef, tested different ways of cooking pizza on his TV programme. He didn't like the pizza stone, preferring to use an upside down red hot cast iron pan, putting the pizza under the grill to finish cooking.

I really can't see why he didn't like the pizza stone. He wanted to cook his pizza in 90 seconds whereas we give ours 15 minutes at gas mark 7. We like thin bases but we also like a lot of toppings so a very hot fast cooking doesn't suit our style of pizza. Sometimes the pizza base would go a bit soft but the hot pizza stone starts cooking the base while the toppings are being applied so the base stays nice and crispy. It's a bit more fiddly than using our normal pizza trays but the improved crispy base makes it all worth while.