gfunkdave - hope you enjoy your stone!

If you can't face the palaver in my earlier posts #24 and #26 ... then as you're clearly salivating now I suggest a couple of ideas to give you something to do.

Why not make an authentic Pizza and use a biga starter for the base. It's like the french use to make baguettes - but they call it poolish.

Get some dried yeast now and put just a few grains into a small tumbler of water and just a little flour and leave it with a bit of kitchen paper over the top and leave it out for a few days. Every so often give it a stir and in a couple of or few days when it starts to froth add a tablespoon of flour or two as extra feed. This is my cheats version of sour dough starter.

When this is a really frothy mix then split it in half and use this as your starter for your dough mix but addd this to your quantity of flour a day or two before your pizza cooking day and leave it in the bottom of your fridge. Do the same with the other half but leave this in something like a chinese take-away plastic box in the bottom of the fridge. This can be halved and used as pizza starter and you won't need to wait a day or two for future pizza. The other half is then increased by more flour and water and put back into the fridge. In future you'll always have a sour dough starter for your pizza. I hope you get the drift of this approach .... but if you agree that pizza is all about the base then a proper sourdough pizza base makes all the difference and gives the chewiness and character that eludes so many home pizza makers.

In the best Napolitan places they use yesterdays made dough for todays pizza until they run out and use sourdough procedures. Hence Napolitans believe that pizza at lunch in these places is often better than the evening stuff.

With respect to the stone ..... make sure you heat it with the grill for 30 minutes or so before you revert to the max oven temperature to ensure a crisp base.

Enjoy your pizza.