In one of Alton's books he talks about putting unglazed quarry tile in your oven to increase its thermal mass, so it'll hold its temperature better. Most tiles have coatings and chemicals in them, that will melt at high temperature and are not very healthy to eat and breathe, so it was a little tricky to track down the right type. After calling 10 different tile places in town, I found some at Dal-Tile that will work. (after seeing them I realized I had seen them at home depot and lowe's, the just weren't labeled right.)
We put them in our oven and they make a remarkable difference. We used to have two rows of them but that was too much for our oven - it would take about an hour to preheat. They also make for great pizza stone (as you can see by all the grease marks). You can also use them for cooking bread, but we've stuck to our standard loaf pans so far. I'm hoping to soon find a good recipe to make a big loaf of italian bread or something to try cooking right on them.
Back to the pizza part. Most pizza stones we saw online were around $20 for the basic ones and $70 for the nice ones. That seems like a lot just for a rock to cook pizza on. I also heard of a lot of people whose stones would crack because of the repeated thermal expansion from cooking them. These stones seemed like a great solution because they're only 6" square, so they oughta be more resistant to cracking than a 20" stone. We liked the pizza so much we went and got a pizza peel from this restaurant supply place that we started going to a lot.
It might seem excessive to have a pizza peel, but it's actually super hard to scoop up a pizza any bigger than 5" across without one. The stones make for super good pizza, really really really good pizza. We like it a lot.
The stones were about $7 for 14 (we're only using 6 now, I got extras for backup in case they bust) and the pizza peel was about $14. Pretty cheap for yummy pizza.
The other thing that may have totally changed our cooking is our 'new' cast iron skillet.
I say 'new' because it's a Griswold Skillet from the 1930s. Everyone online says that the newer ones just aren't the same. Instead of a rough surface the older skillets were machined down super smooth, you almost wouldn't believe how smooth it is. Anyway, the reason we wanted a cast iron skillet goes along the same lines as the oven stones, the iron holds heat. So when you crack an egg onto it, it sizzles.....and then keeps sizzling. It makes for good eats ;) The first time we used it I cooked Becca some eggs and hashbrowns (with fresh sliced potatoes from our Bosch slicer thing) before she left for school, they tasted super good so I made some more. I made some eggs, which tasted great. Then some pancakes, which tasted great. Then some more pancakes, and on and on until it was noon and I realized I hadn't done anything but eat and cook.
Alton said that if he could only have one pan it'd be his cast iron skillet, I'd say the same thing now.
