Pizza stones (or, alternatively, unglazed ceramic tiles) give pizzas, breads, and much more a marvelous crust. Use two layers of pizza stones or tiles and you can turn your oven into a brick oven of sorts.


A pizza stone distributes the heat evenly in your oven, and with the pizza on top of the stone, your homemade pizza will have a great crust. As Instructables user NHLavalanche shows, however, an upper layer helps trap more heat, browning the top of the pizza. Here are some tips if you're using ceramic tiles instead of pizza stones:

You'll need either 2- 12" pieces of UNGLAZED Ceramic quarry tile or 8 pieces of 6" tiles. Again- they ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO BE UNGLAZED. I purchased mine several years ago from a very well known chain (big box) hardware store for 50 cents a piece. That's $4+ tax for the whole thing. ...



We want to arrange the tile in the oven in two layers. The base layer will create the amazing crust we want, while the top will help increase the temperature within the pizza's area by creating radiant heat from the stones above. It will also aid in getting a beautiful, lightly burned top crust.



Place the stones into the oven while it is cold and bring up to the highest temperature possible... 500 Degree F is mine. I let the over preheat for about 45 minutes to get the stones very hot.


While you probably won't be able to achieve true brick oven temperatures with this method, $5 is all it takes to get more evenly baked, closer-to-perfection pizza and other baked goods.

Bonus: Hit up the link below for a homemade pizza recipe and other brick oven tips.

Pizza Margherita (and a $5 DIY Brick Oven) | Instructables via BuzzFeed