Reply #8: What a teriffic summary of peels & baking stones! [View All]

[housewolf]

I've used 1.5" bricks, 6" quarry tiles from Home Depot and 12" quarry tiles from Home Depot and they all work great. Yes, they do take quite a while to heat up - I always give mine at leasat 40-45 minutes, minimum. I also use them for pie crusts a la Rose Levy Youm to ensure a fully-cooked, non-soggy bottom crust. You can really use them in the oven to cook and bake just about anything... when I was using the bricks, they pretty much just lived in the oven because they were heavy. You can clean them by leaving them in the oven when you run the self-clean cycle... and they clean up just great that way.

Parchment paper is my friend. It's so much easier to transfer dough onto a stone using parchment paper using a bare peel and worrying about the dough sticking to the peel... and it also reduces the mess from spilled cornmeal in the oven. The thing about parchment paper is that you want it cut pretty much to size (slightly larger is okay) because over-hanging parchment can burn. And unless your toppings fall onto the parchment, the bread won't stick to it. Plus it's handy for shifting the bread around on the stone (bare dough, when placed on a hot stone, will stick to the stone for a few minutes but releases during the cooking process so it can be easily removed),

I used open-sided aluminum cookie sheets as a peel for a long time, and often still do just because I have one that's smaller and easier to manage than my wooden peel.

They key to success is experimentation... keep trying different things and eventually you'll discover "your way."