On average, I bake two doughs a week, typically a whole wheat sandwich bread and a pizza, with sometimes an incredibly crusty pain à l’ancienne thrown into the mix. My home baking setup is nothing special: I've got fire bricks on the bottom rack of my bottom oven, where I tend to do most of my bread baking.

The bricks work fine, but they're unwieldy, and they're too thick to use in my smaller top oven, which heats up soooo much faster. So I was toying with getting myself a more versatile (if somewhat less massive) pizza stone. And then I started reading rave reviews from home pizza makers about Baking Steel, a 16 by 14 by 1/4 inch thick slab of steel.

The idea is that because it is more conductive than stone, a thick slab of steel will bake more evenly and at lower temperatures than stone. And faster. A faster baking time gives more "spring" to the crust—those larger bubbles that you find in the best pizzas.

Sounds great, but I don't want to spend $79 on something that works no better than what I already have. So... have any of you out in Slogland tried the Baking Steel? And if so, is it worth it?