I scrape ours with a putty knife. With a bit of elbow grease it comes out smooth enough that I can't feel any deposits on it when I close my eyes and run my hand over it. This does nothing to help the appearance, of course :-)

The best way to clean a baking stone is leave it in your oven during a cleaning cycle.

I leave mine in the oven even when roasting a chicken or turkey on high heat. And I bake on it two or three times a week. I dust off any of the excess cornmeal or flour that has stuck to it from breads and then put it through a 3 1/2 hour cleaning cycle.

Before

After

Ann

Thanks Ann - I saw your message in the other thread. I'm actually going to use the self-clean this weekend. In the meantime, we did clean it with just some scraping and water and it worked fine to remove all the baked on "excess".