Help, My Pizza is Stuck to My Pizza Peel!
The perfect baking stone or steel. The perfect temperature. The perfect pizza dough, the perfect sauce, the perfect cheese, the perfect toppings. All you gotta do is slide your pizza into the oven, and you’re mere minutes away from hot, delicious, homemade pizza.
You take your peel and insert it into the oven, giving it a shake to slide the pizza off. That’s when you realize: the pizza won’t budge!
There’s nothing more frustrating than getting stuck (pun intended) on the very last step of making a pizza at home. We feel you – I once got a text from my father telling me I was in big trouble for giving them a pizza stone without properly teaching my mother how to use a pizza peel, resulting in stuck pizzas, delayed dinners, and one mad momma.
To help ease your pizza’s passage onto your stone or steel, we’ve got some tips for you. Using a metal pizza peel can be especially tricky, so in this video, we focus on the best practices for using this specialized tool.
Tips to Prevent Dough From Sticking
- Prep your pizza dough on a separate work surface. Don’t knead or stretch your dough on the peel itself. Use a countertop or a silicone rolling mat, and make sure you sprinkle plenty of flour on your workstation before you get started.
- Coat your pizza peel with flour. The loose flour acts as teeny ball bearings, creating a movable layer between the dough and your peel. You can also use a little bit of cornmeal, but use it sparingly: if the cornmeal makes it onto your pizza stone, it can burn and smoke.
- Once your dough hits the peel, you have to work quickly. You only have a few minutes before your dough absorbs the flour and starts to stick to the metal peel.
- Periodically shake your pizza on the peel while you’re prepping it. It’s a good idea to check and make sure things are still moving throughout the process. If you notice a patch sticking, it’s much easier to slip more flour underneath before your pizza is loaded with toppings.
- To get the pizza off the peel, use a quick back-and-forth motion. Thrust your peel in front of you with a smooth motion, aiming for the middle-back of your stone, then quickly jerk it back. The pizza’s momentum will keep it moving forward, sliding easily off your peel and onto your stone or steel.
- Act quickly! You don’t want to lose too much heat from your oven by leaving the door open. But you also don’t want a metal peel to linger inside a hot oven too long. The heat can transfer to the metal peel, causing the pizza to start cooking even before it hits the stone! This is another cause of stuck pizzas.
Still need help? Check out some of our other pizza tips:
- No Mixer? No Problem. No-Knead Pizza Dough Recipe
- How To Fix Sticking Pizza Dough
- Store-Bought Dough: Who's Is Best
- All About Yeast
See what we are cooking today in the Pizzacraft kitchen - Instagram: @_Pizzacraft
17 comments
I’m 72 and I learned this tip working in a pizzeria when I was 19! We made our own dough and had our pizza crust rolled out and ready to create our master pizza. So how did we accomplish this. Two ways: (one) we would have someone baking the pizza shells on non stick round pizza pans for 60 seconds. FYI this happens in a 300 degree oven like your kitchen oven. This firms up the crust just enough without destroying the dough texture. Using this 60 second crust we could then pile on the goodies and then using a (corn meal prepared) peel delivery the pizza into the oven without a miss step. (two) if the pizza rush got over whelming we would just build the pizza on the non stick pans and slide the pizza off after 4 minutes. The second method is a pain in the arse if you are working fast in a pizzeria but we did what we had to do. We would never attempt to transfer raw dough from a peel to the oven. Ain’t gonna happen in a pizzeria. I use both methods for my Pizzacraft propane heated pizza oven and I personally like number one way best although other see no difference if I use method two.
Another tip, if it’s really stuck to a metal peel, just leave it there.
Yep, leave the peel on the blazing hot stone; good thing it’s metal, right? After 2-4 minutes, the crust should set well enough to slide right off, as the stone’s heat has passed through the peel into the crust. This trick saved me once or twice.
Now, however, I build all pizza on screens, especially when there are guests, multiple cooks and lots of distractions that mean it takes longer to assemble a pie. I use the same technique; put it into the oven on the screen, use the peel to remove the pizza/screen combo after about 4 minutes, then use the peel under the now-set crust to transfer it back to the stone, naked, to finish up.
The screen technique permits pizza to be made 20-30 minutes in advance, with little risk of them sticking to the screen unless they’re very wet crust or spring a sauce leak. A little practice and all pies are risk-free and have a neat little quilted screen pattern baked onto the underside of the crust.
I prefer using a wooden peel. Dough does not stick as quickly.
The only thing more frustrating than dough sticking to the peel is dough sliding off the back of the pizza stone in the Pizza Craft oven. Hate that mess. Impossible to clean up.
Use parchment paper ,works great. Just cut it to shape and no more sticky crust.
Read Jim Lahey’s book My_Pizza. Spread cornmeal on your pizza peel, not flour. Round the pizza dough. Then, place your rounded pizza dough on your pizza peel. Apply your toppings while the rounded pizza dough is on the peel. Jerk your pizza dough with toppings onto your pizza stone. Then, the pizza dough will not get stuck on the peel. Works every time.