For many years, my pizza stone languished on the top shelf of a closet with the other one-trick kitchen tools: a wok and the canning utensils. The $14 stone was there because it had failed me.

I thought it would be fun to make homemade pizza to eat before the final episode of The Sopranos. Knowing our tastes, I'm positive the pizza was loaded with toppings. I threw that raw dough, loaded with toppings, onto a cold pizza stone and into a hot oven. The result was that the dough took forever to bake as the cheese and other toppings became more and more brown. That night we ate a lovely salad brought by my friend Sarah and a pizza with a not-very-done crust and overdone toppings.

Sarah mentioned that she often baked her pizza crust for a few minutes before adding the toppings. That germ of an idea didn't really take hold, though, until I thought about trying to make pizza again. In the midst of a recession, I can't bring myself to pay for pizza delivery.

It's no wonder. I calculated that ingredients for a homemade pepperoni pizza cost $5.62. Compare that with $15.29, without tip, for a Pizza Hut pepperoni pizza delivered to your door.

My pizza stone epiphany came when I picked up Peter Reinhart's American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza. Reinhart, a renowned baker, teaches at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, N.C.

In the book, Reinhart explains several methods for turning out great pizza from a home oven. Beyond installing a hearth kit insert for about $200, the next best option seemed to be spending less than $15 on a pizza stone.

Reinhart explains that the pizza stone is a thermal mass that absorbs the oven heat, acting much like the brick-lined ovens used in pizzerias.

For my first round with this method, I baked the pizza crust for about five minutes before adding toppings. (This was done to avoid repeating my Sopranos' pizza disaster.) What came out was thick crust filled with flaky air bubbles and perfectly done toppings -- a far cry from the dense frozen pizzas that I had relied on for a cheap pizza fix. The second round involved a whole-wheat dough recipe that a friend recommended. It turned out denser dough with fewer air bubbles, but it pleased my sister-in-law.

The third round was pizza nirvana for me. I used a recipe from Reinhart's book for Neo-Neopolitan pizza dough. It produces a super-thin crust that's so addictive that I always surprise myself with the number of slices I devour.

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