Bake crispy pizza bases or crusty loaves easily in your home oven using this robust heavyweight baking steel. Following the concept of the “pizza stone”, this 5mm thick slab of steel absorbs the heat from your oven and conducts it directly into your baking, leaving a finish usually only achievable in a high-temperature bread-maker’s or pizza oven. The advantages over a stone are numerous: steel conducts heat far more effectively so it heats up faster and bakes quicker. Plus – short of firing an anti-tank round at it, its pretty much unbreakable!

There’s nothing stopping you slapping it on the hob or over your fire to use as a griddle too. Just make sure to heat evenly to avoid warping.

The dimensions are 34 x 34cm by 5mm thick. Thats about 13.5″ square by 13/64″ thick. It’s a heavy bugger too, clocking in at 5kg (11lbs) of heat-absorbing goodness!

The steel is not coated with any dodgy finishes to wear off or stick to your food, rather it is simply seasoned with vegetable oil in the time-honoured fashion. In order to maintain its non-stick properties then avoid detergents, simply wipe clean and re-season periodically. It will improve over its life as it builds up its natural seasoning and develops a progressively darker colour.

For the ethical consumer – this product also makes use of scrap steel which would otherwise be weighed in and go through a high-energy process of being melted down and reprocessed. I source this steel as offcuts from a local business that builds HGV bodies – so I’m doing them a favour, they’re doing me a favour, and we are both doing the environment a favour. What’s not to like?

As with all my products, these are made to order so please be patient at busy times – they make take a week or two to get to you.