Short answer: a Baking Steel arrives pre-seasoned and ready to cook on. You do not need to season it before first use. Every one is seasoned by hand with organic flax oil and baked in our own ovens in Hanover, Massachusetts before it ships. Most pizza steels are not, and arrive as raw carbon steel you have to oil and bake yourself.
Here's why we've done it this way since 2012.
I decided this before there was anyone to compare us to
When I brought the Baking Steel to market in 2012, I had already made up my mind about one thing. I was not going to ship a customer a raw piece of steel.
There was no competition to compare myself against. Nobody was selling a pizza steel. I could have done it any way I wanted, and the easiest way by a mile would have been to cut the plate, put it in a box, and include a card telling you how to season it yourself.
I didn't want to do that then and I still don't. Here's why.
Raw steel starts rusting the day it's cut
Bare carbon steel and air are not friends. Add a little humidity, a truck, a warehouse, a porch in the rain, and you have surface rust before the box is ever opened.
And once rust starts, it is hard to stop. You can clean it off, and we'll show you how, but you're now fighting the surface instead of cooking on it. That's a bad way to meet a tool you're supposed to have for thirty years.
Seasoning is the barrier. Oil is baked onto the bare metal until it polymerizes and becomes part of the surface, and that layer is what stands between the steel and everything that wants to corrode it. A seasoned steel ships protected. A raw one ships exposed and hopes for the best.
The first layer sets up the whole life of the steel
This is the part people underestimate.
Seasoning builds. Every time you cook, you add to it. The surface darkens, evens out, gets slicker. A steel you've had ten years cooks better than one out of the box, and that isn't sentiment, it's the accumulated layers doing their job.
But all of that is built on the first one. Get the base layer right, applied to properly prepared bare metal and baked on correctly, and every layer after it has something to bond to. Get it wrong, or skip it and let the steel sit raw and spotted for a month before you get around to it, and you spend the next year fighting a surface that never quite settles.
I wanted every customer starting from the right first layer. Not their version of it. Ours.
How we do it
We source our steel from American mills. I still tell our cutters where it comes from, because it's the kind of thing a customer has no way to verify and I'd rather not hand that decision to someone else.
Then it goes through our shop in Hanover, Massachusetts, the plant my dad built. My brother Eric runs it.
Shot blast. The steel is blasted down to bare metal. Mill scale is the bluish-black oxide layer that forms on steel during hot rolling, and it has to come off completely. Seasoning will not bond to it. This takes an industrial machine, and it's the step that makes every step after it work.
Logo. Our mark goes on.
Oil, by hand. Organic flax oil, wiped across the surface one steel at a time. Not dipped, not sprayed. Someone puts their hands on every one of them. Flax because it polymerizes hard and clean, the same principle behind a well-kept cast iron pan.
Bake. Into our ovens so the oil sets and bonds to the steel.
The bake is one hour. The steel takes hours.
People hear "we season it" and picture someone brushing on oil and sliding it in the oven. That's the last part, and it's the easy part.
Start to finish, a single Baking Steel is in process for hours. One of those hours is the bake. The rest is preparation, and the preparation is the arduous part. Blasting every trace of mill scale off. Handling a heavy plate through each station. Getting the oil on evenly, by hand, thin enough that it sets hard instead of staying tacky. Checking it. Any one of those done carelessly and the surface tells on you a year later.
There's no shortcut in there. I've looked.
Those ovens exist for this. We had them built for seasoning steels, which is not a thing you find sitting in a fabrication shop. That was the investment I made in 2012 so that you would never have to do this part, and it's the same reason a raw plate from a metal shop can't be turned into a Baking Steel with a bottle of oil and a home oven.
If a company ships you a raw piece of steel, it's usually because they can't do this. Not because they decided you'd enjoy it.
Yours will not look like the photo
Because it's done by hand, no two come out identical. You might see a swirl. You might see a patch darker than the rest. People email us worried they got a bad one.
That's the oil. It's supposed to look like that. Cook on it and the whole surface deepens and evens out.
One thing that changes how often you re-season: your oven
Gas and electric ovens treat a steel differently, and it surprises people.
Burning natural gas produces water, roughly two pounds of vapor for every pound of gas burned. An electric element produces none. So a steel living in a gas oven spends time around moisture that an electric oven never creates, mostly during preheat and while the oven cools.
It doesn't mean you have the wrong oven. It means your steel wants a slightly better habit than your friend's does, and more seasoning layers over time. I wrote the whole thing up here: Why Does My Baking Steel Rust in a Gas Oven?
Open the box, preheat, make a pizza
That's the entire onboarding. No prep, no first-time ritual, no hour of baking oil before you get to eat anything.
Fourteen years in, this is still the part I'm most stubborn about. It's slow and it's physical and it's the most expensive thing we do to a piece of steel, and we love doing it for you. That's the whole point. We take the hours so that the first thing you do with your Baking Steel is cook on it.
Shop the Baking Steel Original →
Common questions
Do I need to season my Baking Steel before I use it? No. It arrives seasoned by hand with organic flax oil and is ready to cook on out of the box. Preheat it for 45 to 60 minutes and launch a pizza.
Do all pizza steels come pre-seasoned? No. Most ship as raw carbon steel, which means oiling the surface and baking it for about an hour before you can cook, usually more than once.
How long does it take to season a pizza steel? At our plant, a single steel is in process for hours. The bake itself is one hour. The rest is preparation: shot blasting the mill scale off, handling, and applying the oil by hand. At home on a raw steel you'd be looking at an hour of baking per coat, usually more than one coat, on a surface that was never properly stripped to begin with.
What oil is a Baking Steel seasoned with? Organic flax oil. Flax polymerizes hard and clean, so it sets into a durable surface instead of staying tacky.
Why does my steel have swirls or dark patches? Because it was seasoned by hand, one at a time. No two look identical. That's the oil, not a defect, and the surface evens out as you cook.
Will a raw pizza steel rust before I season it? It can. Bare carbon steel starts oxidizing on contact with air and moisture, and surface rust is much easier to prevent than to stop once it starts. A seasoned steel ships protected.
Do I ever need to re-season it? Occasionally, to maintain the surface. But seasoning builds every time you cook, so a steel you've used for years is better seasoned than a new one. How often depends partly on your oven: gas ovens produce water vapor when they burn, so steels in gas ovens want more layers and a faster dry-off than steels in electric. Full explanation here: Why Does My Baking Steel Rust in a Gas Oven?
Does the oven I have change whether my steel comes seasoned? No. Every Baking Steel ships seasoned regardless. Your oven only affects how often you'll want to add to that seasoning over the years. See gas versus electric for the wider comparison.
About the Author
Andris Lagsdin invented the Baking Steel in 2012 at his family's steel plant in Hanover, Massachusetts, after reading that a slab of steel would outperform what everyone was baking on. He cut the first one himself. It went up on Kickstarter that August, got picked up by Kenji López-Alt at Serious Eats, and fourteen years later every Baking Steel is still made in that same shop and seasoned by hand.
Before that he trained under Todd English and spent fifteen years in the family steel business. He co-wrote Baking with Steel with Jesse Olson Moore, and he's taught thousands of people to make pizza at home through free online classes he still runs himself.
He answers his own email.