Broken baking stones

[mike]

I now have two broken baking stones.

• I'm cooking pizza in a wood-fired oven
• The floor is flaking so I put a baking stone in the oven and cook on it
• The baking stone is fine during firing, fine during cooking, and then cracks sometime after cooking.

Does anyone else have this problem? or better yet, know how to avoid it?

PS I'm not sure where this question should go so I'm cross-posting:

- Oven Management/Firing Your Oven
- Brick Oven Cooking/Get Cooking
- Pizza Quest with Peter Reinhart/Pizza Stone Baking

[Giovanni Rossi]

Baking stones should easily handle the heat of your oven. Problems with thermal shock occur with rapid temp changes. If you are putting a cold stone in a hot oven, the fracture may happen then, but not actually crack open until the stone cools. Likewise, removing a stone from a hot oven is not the best idea. I build a mini oven with two stones and firebrick in my grill. I heat the assembly up slowly over about 30 min and eventually start baking at around 650 F. When finished, I leave everything in place and let the whole assembly cool down. It takes about 3 hours before I can handle the firebrick. I’ll probably continue to use this setup even after I build my WFO when I just want to pop out a few pizze. I have used these baking stones dozens of times and only see two very small fractures on the edge of one.