My advice is to not get him one, but two, unless you’re never ever ever going to make more than one pizza. The thing is, you need the peel to get the pizza into AND out of the oven.
I’ve found that when you make a pizza, you want to assemble it on the peel, as doughy soft heavy wet pizzas are hard to transfer from the counter to the peel. So unless you have two peels or are MUCH better at the transfer from counter to peel than I am, you want one peel with the next pizza on it, ready to go into the oven, and the other peel available to take the pizza in the oven out.
And I guess I should ask… does anyone here NOT assemble their pizza on the peel? Is there a transfer technique I’m not aware of that works well?
Just a note on using peels: your dough can easily stick to a peel. Even a small bit of stickiness can completely ruin a pizza, resulting on a broken pizza on the oven floor. Yes, you can use cornmeal to stop it from sticking, but it will burn up in your oven and produce smoke. You can use flour, but it’s tricky to get it to not stick while not ending up with an excessively floured crust. I use a piece of parchment paper, put it on the peel, and assemble the pizza on that. No chance of sticking at all.
I have a wooden peel. Last year I decided to try making pizza on a stone. I didn’t want to spend the money on a ‘real’ pizza stone, and I didn’t happen upon a paving stone (or whatever they’re called). So I got a piece of slate from a rock store. I assembled pizzas on the peel, and cooked them on the stone. But then I decided it was easier to just make pizza in a 12" cast-iron skillet. At least that way I can make them round.
Coincidentally, I’d DVR’d Good Eats the other night and Alton Brown was making ‘wood fired’ (actually, he used a gas grill) pizzas. He used a wood peel, and said it was his favourite.
Unglazed quarry tile from the Home Depot/Menard’s/Lowe’s is the usual cheap alternative to a pizza stone, for anyone interested.
That’s my technique these days, sort of. I start the pizzas on the stovetop in a blazing cast iron skillet. The bottom of the dough finishes in about a minute to a minute thirty, with nice black flecks like you get in a properly heated wood-fired oven. I then finish it in a preheated 450 oven, directly on the center rack (off the skillet. Some people have a technique where they heat the pan on the stovetop, then put the pizza in the pan and immediately under the broiler, but I’ve had better luck with my technique and it’s easier.
I actually like the cheapo aluminum peels for their thinness. I just find them slightly easier to deal with than a wooden peel, and, if for some reason your crust gets stuck to something, it’s easier to use it as a spatula to dig your pizza out.
Pan (Pizza hut): the crust is rolled into an oiled pan, it rises in the same pan, the frame for the crust fits over the pan, and it is baked in the pan. The oven is set so that the heat deflection from the pan is accounted for (bottom has twice as many gas burners as the top.
Frame (Dominos): after the crust is rolled, it is placed on a wire frame and prepared there. The entire frame is placed into the oven. It allows for more heat to come from the bottom of the oven.
Dusted (CPK): the counter is dusted with flour. After being rolled, the crust is dipped in flour. The peel is also dusted. However, this only works if the peel is kept cool and dry.
The “hot peel technique” (CPK): there were two types of peel use at CPK: hot peel or dusted peel. I preferred the hot peel technique. If the peel is very hot, the crust won’t stick to it as any moisture instantly evaporates and any scratches on the dough will be seared by the peel.
For 1 and 2, a wooden peel, pliers, or even a big spatula is used to get the pizza out of the oven. For 3 and 4, you need a metal peel.
I should also mention that moisture is what ruins a pizza. Moisture causes the dough to stick to the peel. Moisture mainly comes from the dough, but it can also transfer from the sauce through a hole in the dough and or a drop on the counter. It can also come from a cooked pizza to ruin the next uncooked pizza. However, even if all stray drops are accounted for, you can also get condensation from the dough onto the peel. This is why, if you leave cold dough on a warm (not hot) peel, it sticks. The peel must be very cold or very hot. A warm peel is bad.
Imho, I really don’t like the pan-less methods of rolling dough. You get a lifeless flatbread and it’s like eating the toppings in a tortilla or calzone. Dough rising results in a much fluffier, thicker crust. I would recommend, after balling the dough, to let it rise for 20-30 minutes, then rolling it into a pan, and letting it rise to fill the pan for 30-60 minutes at room temperature or slightly above room temperature, then cooling it in the fridge for 15-20 minutes. Allowing for a slow, gradual rise prevents those massive air blisters.
Heat warping/bending is usually an issue with peels. I forget which metal is better, but my gut says it’s unavoidable. Iirc, a bent peel had no effect on the quality of the pizza. We only used one type of peel at each place I worked at. Wooden peels were only for cutting boards and for placing cooked pizzas into boxes, not for transfer into or out of the oven.
FYI, Alton Brown just did an episode on Good Eats about making crispy crust pizza, and did mention peels (he prefers his wooden peel, named…Emma). He makes his pizza on the grill, with the peel.
Here’s a link that shows when the episode will be on again.
Since the OP said she likes fluffy pizza while her husband likes crispy, the original Good Eatspizza episode did feature a fluffy crust. Unfortunately, it aired the other night but is not airing again soon.
I have a wood peel. It is not only good for pizza, I use it for quesadillas as well; cover the skillet with the peel, flip both over and slide the quesadilla back into the skillet to heat the other side. Less messy than using a spatula, especially when using burrito-sized tortillas.
Mine is the flimsy aluminum kind, and I won it in a raffle with a bunch of Italian food items. I also use it for getting the cheesecake off the bottom of the springform pan, among other things.
Anybody have any thoughts on why a metal peel? I use wood and have never even considered getting a metal one.
For the past couple years I’ve been using the Super Peel silenus linked to. It’s well made and a good size for a home oven, though a bit pricy. I don’t use the cloth gadget for my thin crust New York style pizza but do find it useful for wet, sticky bread dough like ciabatta … it might be good for heavy thick crust pizzas but I don’t do that so can’t say for sure.
RE: Using two peels to speed up the process. Not a good idea, methinks. The stone needs time to regain some heat between pizzas.
I’m talking about home baking. I assume in your commercial pizza oven that unless you were running at absolute maximum capacity, you would tend to put a pie on a different section of the stone when you removed one pie and immediately inserted another, right? And you did that because the recently used area was at a somewhat lower temperature than the nearby area that had not had a pizza baked on it the past couple of minutes, right?
Ignoring the jiggling and fiddling that can take place in a commercial oven (because the home baker doesn’t have the option to move the pie around to different sections in his quest for the perfect crust), I suggest that when you bake a pizza on a stone some of the heat in the stone is transferred to the pizza and the stone is then at a lower than optimal temperature for baking another pizza … and you should, therefore, wait a while for the stone to come back up to temperature … and that not doing so will produce inconsistent results.
I’ll grant that homemade pizza will still likely be better than chain store pizza if you don’t reheat the stone, but it will be even better if you do.
