Yes, you do want to set it out to warm for a couple of hours before you use it. The warming/resting period will help it relax and not fight with you when you go to roll or toss it out. You’ll find if it’s warm, you can roll it to whatever thickness you prefer with little trouble.
I like to use a nicely floured peel, place the dough on that to shape or roll, build the pizza, then coax it with a spatula and a quick slip of the peel onto the heated stone in the oven, which I sprinkle with cornmeal just before putting the pizza on it. I use the cornmeal because I like the taste it adds, not because I’m worried about the pizza sticking to the stone.
I don’t care if a pizza is perfectly round. In fact, it’s kind of funny some of the shapes they come out. We used to laugh about my late husband’s pizzas, because the shape was always a Map o’Tassie.
What temperature did Ray Bradbury say was the ignition temperature of paper? Keep your oven below 451 degrees and paper will not spontaneously ignite.
We use cast iron skillets to bake pizza. Every kid gets their own skillet and makes their own pizza to their own specifications. And pizza dough is dead easy to make, just flour, water, yeast and salt, let it rise overnight or even just over the day. Buying frozen dough is a huge waste of money.
If you’re having trouble getting your dough thin enough, I’d suggest rolling/patting it out into a disk and then letting it rest for half an hour or so, and then flattening it again. That lets the gluten fibers relax into the new shape.
Pizza steel is the bee’s knees. You do have to let it thoroughly heat up, which can take a while.
I was playing over xmas with a wood fired pizza oven. Actually, it was just fitted bricks. I got it up to about 650 degrees based on a thermometer near the opening. I tried several things. Let me say that parchment paper on the pizza steel ignited instantly. Also, when I had that steel hot (I had the fire on the steel, then pushed the red hot coals into the back of the oven next to the steel), the pizza dough would burn after about 20 seconds on the steel. After messing around for 4 afternoons, I decided that a real out door brick oven isn’t for me and that it would be too much work to figure out my fitted brick hack vs putting the pizza steel in the oven at 550 degrees for 45 minutes and then baking my pizza on that.
But that’s just it; I do my pizzas with the oven at 550, and then fire up the broiler once the pizza’s actually in the oven. (from here).
It makes for awesome homemade pizzas; better than almost all commercial places except for the Neapolitan certified places. The one catch is that it’s kind of a pain- the cornmeal has a tendency to char, and any cheese that melts off the pizzas tends to char and stick to the steel. So a next-morning chore is usually to scrape all the burned-on crud off the steel and shop-vac out the inside of the oven.
Their Sir Lancelot flour makes awesome pizza crusts, since it’s very high protein. We found their special pizza blend to have some weird flavor (maybe it’s the baking powder they add?), and haven’t tried their Italian 00 knock-off yet.
I can find a lot of anecdotes that say that what will happen at 550 degrees Fahrenheit is that edges will char and the paper under the dough will be brittle, but that it will still work.
While we had a stone, we never actually built a pizza from scratch on it. Heck, a lot of times, we’d just cook with a pan on top of it. I was under the impression it just made the heat more even.
