Do Pizza Stones Smell?
Brand new pizza stones have a neutral, clean smell when purchased. It is when you start using them that odours start to develop. I hope you experience nothing but pleasant smells, but if you’ve landed here, this is probably not the case.
Improper cleaning techniques are usually the cause of strange odours coming from your baking stone. Keep reading to learn a simple solution that rids your stone (and kitchen) from these unpleasant smells.
What’s Causing Your Stone To Smell?
Washing your pizza stone with soapy water? Running it through the dishwasher?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, we may have found the problem! Pizza stones have a porous surface that traps liquids (water, grease, and oil). It is exceedingly difficult to remove these liquids once they have been trapped.
For water, all you need to do is set it out to dry for a few days. However, it’s not so easy when it comes down to oils. They will smoke at high temperatures, which is why your stone is producing these bad odours.
Here are some ways to get it to stop smoking:
- – Remove grease and oils. When left for a long period, oils trapped will go rancid, leading to bad odours. You can eliminate these smells by cleaning your stone with baking soda.
- – Burn it off in your ovens cleaning cycle. Some ovens have a self-cleaning cycle. How this works is it heats up at a very high temperature. This will turn unwanted food debris to ash while “smoking out” whatever is trapped within your pizza stone.
- – Take matters outside. If you don’t want to fill your kitchen with smoke, use a pizza oven, BBQ, or gas grill outside. This will have the same effect as the indoor oven cleaning cycle. You’ll want to heat the stone for about an hour and a half.
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Don’t beat yourself up if you’ve been cleaning your stone wrong this whole time. It happens to the best of us! Now that you have this knowledge, you can say goodbye to funny smells once and for all.
