Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
There must be a trick
I have a pizza peel. I have a stone. But for the life of me, I can’t get the pizza to slide from peel to stone.
I floured the peel and sprinkled corn meal on it, then checked to see that my dough would slip around okay. It did. I skimped on the tomato sauce, since I can recall problems with a damp, doughy crust when I’ve used too much sauce, and I didn’t want to make the whole thing too heavy (sliding problem, once again). I didn’t particularly care for the idea of adding sauce, cheese, and meat once the dough was already in the oven, since inevitably I give myself a hell of a burn reaching into the oven. So I loaded up my pizza and then tried to slide it off the peel.
No go.
I used a large spatula to loosen the pizza from the peel, working circumferentially to lift every last bit from the wood. It still wouldn’t slide.
Fortunately, I could fold the pizza over and make a calzone, which for some bizarre reason slid very nicely onto the stone. Still, I’d rather have had a pizza. The meat inside a calzone never gets crispy the way pizza meat does.
I’ve become quite good at pizza and focaccia doughs. I start the dough at around noon, first making a sponge of 1 cup of unbleached flour, 1 cup of water, and a packet of yeast. I whisk it up along with a half teaspoon of salt and about a teaspoon of honey. Wait for it to get frothy — about an hour or so at room temperature — then whisk in another teaspoon of honey, half teaspoon of salt, another cup of flour, and a good bit of olive oil, maybe 2 tablespoons. The dough may be a little wet, but that’s okay. You still have another rise to go through. After that, you can turn it out onto a floured wooden board, and as you knead the dough, you can work more flour into it to make something that looks like pizza dough.
If you’re making focaccia, don’t bother kneading or working in extra flour. Turn the moist dough onto parchment paper and use a large plastic spatula to push and pull the dough into the right shape. Add your toppings, then bake at 450 F until done.
Now, if I could get the damn thing to slide off the peel, I’d be in business.
D.
What about just cornmeal, no flour? Lots of cornmeal. It seems like I’ve used my peel successfully for pizza before (small-ish ones) and I haven’t floured the peel.
I admit to using prepared pizza dough, which comes rolled up in parchment paper. One unrolls the dough and puts the whole thing, paper and dough, on the oven sheet. Very handy! I am now into cheese-stuffed crust, so do that using pre-shredded cheese and pizza spice. Then it’s one jar of Barilla’s Basilico sauce, one can of sliced mushrooms, one chopped red pepper, one sliced onion, one small can of sliced black olives, one clove of garlic minced, one zucchini sliced, then more cheese, capped by sliced pepperoni, and a bit more cheese over the whole thing.
I get rave reviews, which have assuaged my guilt over using so many preprocessed ingredients…
Anyway, try parchment paper…
Tricia, yes, it seems logical that more little ball bearings (i.e corn meal) should make life easier.
Kira, yes, that had occurred to me too. *Kicking head* and I even have the paper.
At the pizza place, they put cornmeal on the peel. The best ones, the ones with a real forno, the crust comes back with a nice little sprinkling of blackened cornmeal on the bottom side of the crust.
On another topic completely, could I suggest that instead of holding all comments for moderation, you try enabling “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” in “Settings…discussions…Before a comment appears”. This would mean that the first time one of us comments, you would have to approve it, but after that as long as we used the same email address (which only you and WordPress can see) we would be autoapproved.
I use those easy glide baking tray liners, bake-o-glide. They’re amazing, but I’ve never had a problem with pizza sticking. I make the dough in the bread machine – 50 minutes and it’s ready to shape and go. But I’ve not tried a cheese crust yet! I’ll have to give that one a go.
How do you stretch the dough? I find mine gets super elastic and springs back to a 9 inch round no matter what I do – perhaps that’s normal? Am I expecting too much for it to behave like other doughs that roll out nice?
Also, I have clue what a pizza peel is…I’ll have to look it up.
I’ve never used a peel before. We regularly make pizza from scratch around here. Usually I press my dough into a circle right on a well oiled stone, and then bake it for 5-10 minutes. Then I heap on the toppings. I’ve never really had a problem with the dough sticking. But, then again, my stone is VERY well used and seasoned!
Dean: done. I’ve been nervous about making any changes in the settings, since the current ‘high security’ situation has prevented any hacking. I’ve backed everything up, and we’ll see how it goes. I can’t imagine how they could hack under the “Comment author must have a previously approved comment” setting, but I never understood how they were hacking in the first place.
Lyvvie: think giant pizza-sized wooden spatula.
Rella: but don’t you use a pre-heated stone?
Stone is cold when I press the dough onto it, and then after the initial 5-10 minutes in the oven it’s good to go. Never had it stick yet. Well, okay once, but I hadn’t oiled the stone at ALL…. our stone is dark, and very well seasoned!
Gotcha.
And oh, hey, the new comments system works, and I haven’t been hacked!
The parchment idea sounds intriguing. I once tried to get three loaves of bread off the peel and onto the stone, and that was a really horrible experiment.