Reply #4: Peels and stones [View All]

[Stinky The Clown]

There are two kinds of peels - metal and wood. There are actually several flavors of each, but for us, that's all we need to know.

Metal peels are thin. They're used to remove pizzas from an oven and to manipulate the pizza while it is in there. Wood peels are used to assemble a raw pizza and then to deposit it in the oven.

I suggest getting one of each. The wood peels can be found anywhere. The metal peels are harder to come by, but they're cheap. A restaurant supply store may have them.

Get a wood peel of about 12" to 14" width and with a short handle.


Get a metal peel of about the same size. Metal peels have wooden handles and are most often made of aluminum.


Pizza stones are the subject of much discussion. On the low end, you can, in fact, use tiles. Here's what a stone is doing: It is forming an even heat source that can overcome the 'shock' of a cold slab of dough hitting it. You want mass. Mass stores heat. The dough needs heat. A lot of mass can give up heat to the dough and not get too cold. Also, a stone has the effect of removing moisture from the dough, resulting in a better bottom crust. So ..... tiles are okay.

One 3/8" thick 18 x 18 unglazed tile is just fine. A few bucks each. Okay, but quite low mass.


Then you can buy those light colored stones that you see in the cooking stores and even at places like Target. They do very well at absorbing moisture, but lack a little in the mass department. They're okay, to be sure, but not perfect. Some are round, some are rectangular. Shape matters little, really. Fifteen to twenty bux, tops.


At the high end are **very** heavy, high mass ceramic stones. They weigh well over twenty pounds and cost over a hundred bux, but have so much mass you can cook pizzas all day long and never cool them down.


All of these demand a long preheat and high temperature - no home oven gets really high enough, so just whack yours up as high as it will go. The tiles need maybe 30 minutes. The middle ones at least 45 minutes, and the heavy ones, an hour, minimum.

When you make the raw pizzas on the wooden peel, be sure the dough is on a well floured surface or one dusted with corn meal. You do NOT want a raw pizza to stick to your wooden peel.

Most of all .... have fun! And search here in C&B for pizza recipes. Pizza is a VERY popular topic with us and seems to be never ending.