Pizza Peel??

[Brian Penning]

Dunno why it's called a "peel" but anyway, SWMBO wants one, so.....

http://www.breadtopia.com/uploads/Image/SassafrasPeel500w.JPG

It looks simple enough at first but anyone made one before? Tips?
There seems to be different handle lengths and what is the general thickness of the wide paddle part?
They also appear to have a wide bevelled edge. Is it bevelled on 1 side only OR both sides?
Finish?
Thanks in advance for any and all replies.

[John Keeton]

Brian, I will step out on a limb here. The only thing I know about peels is seeing them in pizza shops, etc.

But, since they are used to place and retrieve baked goods/pizza from a stone oven, only the top edge would be beveled. I would not finish the wood (or perhaps simply some mineral oil) as it will be exposed to abrasion, heat and moisture on a regular basis. I doubt any finish would hold up.

On dimensions, a little research indicated that they are sized to the oven for the most part, so width and length are user defined as would be the length of the handle. I would imagine thickness will be somewhat dependent on the ultimate size and type of wood. Stability would be key as a warped peel would be useless. Maple??

Interesting project! Let us know with pics when finished.

[Heather Thompson]

Brian,

As John stated, the size is variable but the bevel is on both sides, at least the one I have used for the last 25 years is. There is no finish on mine, a friend of mine made one for his mother and he applied a simple wipe on oil. The one he made was very small, personal pizza size, with a very long handle.

Heather

[Brian Penning]

Brian,

As John stated, the size is variable but the bevel is on both sides, at least the one I have used for the last 25 years is. There is no finish on mine, a friend of mine made one for his mother and he applied a simple wipe on oil. The one he made was very small, personal pizza size, with a very long handle.

Heather

Thanks Heather,
How thick is yours? ½"?

[Barry Vabeach]

Brian, I have made a couple. 1/2 " will work but it feels a little thick to me - I made one slightly thinner and that one has a little better balance. Generally, you want the handle to be thicker than the surface of the peel. Definitely no finish, except mineral oil. When you wive uses it, she should spread a little cornmeal on it before putting on the dough so it won't stick.

[Joe Pelonio]

We have two of them, The first was too small, so we bought a larger one. It does need a good bevel to get between the pizza and stone in the oven. We have cut the pizza on one side of it to save dirtying a pan, and I wish it was a harder wood because it now has a lot of cut marks on it. They are both unfinished, we dust it with flour only.

I'd suggest a little sharper bevel than the store bought ones, more like a spatula.

[Burt Alcantara]

Not to rain on your parade but metal peels are much better for the home chef. If you put a pie on a wooden peel and don't put in the oven immediately, it will stick, corn meal or not.

The wood will suck up any moisture in the crust whereas metal will allow the pie to slide.

Burt

[Randal Stevenson]

Not to rain on your parade but metal peels are much better for the home chef. If you put a pie on a wooden peel and don't put in the oven immediately, it will stick, corn meal or not.

The wood will suck up any moisture in the crust whereas metal will allow the pie to slide.

Burt


The metal ones do get used in pizza places more, where as the wood peels, act as cutting/placing boards (sliding pizza's into boxes and on tins).
16 or 17" around, judging by the space around a large 15" pizza. (although they do make larger, I've seen one that was 25" long) and around 5/16" thick.

[Howard Acheson]

Most Italian pizza joints use two sized peels. Large, short handled one that are used to assemble the pizza and put it in the oven. It needs to be large so it supports the floppy, uncooked pie.

The small, long handled peel is used to rotate the cooking pizza and to remove it when it is cooked. The longer handle is to keep your hands out of the oven.

That said, make yours any size you want.

[Brian Penning]

Yeah, I had read that the wooden one is used to make the pizza and then put it in the oven for the 1st time and use the metal one to turn and remove it.

[Ben Franz]

Heresy, I know but...

Restaurant supply houses sell peels in a wide selection of sizes and they're dirt cheap. I don't make my own wooded spoons either.

My opinion only. If you make one, pay attention to weight - a heavy peel loaded with a large pizza is tough to handle when you're bent over a hot oven.

[Barry Vabeach]

One advantage to a home made peel, is you can size it to fit your pizza stone and oven. For the last peel I made, I made it a few inches longer and wider than my stone then inset some markers ( dowels of contrasting wood ) that are the exact dimension of the stone so that when I am stretching out the dough I know when to stop. It is true that the dough will stick to the wood more than to the metal - one tip is to get everything ready first - sauce and toppings, then stretch out the dough on the peel and put everything on it and get it right in the oven. If you take more than a few minutes, it will stick to the peel. While I use a peel to take it out, I then transfer to a heavy aluminum pan to cut it, I wouldn't slice it while on the peel.

[Mike Hess]

As somebody who worked in a Pizza Restaraunt through college, I have used a Pizza Peel a few (thousand) times.

The bevel is on both sides. The ones we used weren't more than 3/8" thick - maybe more like 1/4" and had a little bit of an oil finish. We washed and disinfected ours every day and then wiped on a little vegetable oil. This probably wouldn't work for home use where they get used occasionally as the oil may go bad between uses.

Ours had a longer, rounder handle than the one in the picture. When you slide the pizza off the paddle end, you usually do it by tipping it to the side, not to the front, and a 2-hand sized round handle is better for this than a single hand sized flat handle.

[jeremy levine]

I use mine at home a ton. One thing if you make or buy a wooden one, designate one side for the pie. That is to say don't alternate. The side that touch the stone will get more dirt and wear and make it hard to side pies on and off.

[Neil Bosdet]

It looks simple enough at first but anyone made one before? Tips?
There seems to be different handle lengths and what is the general thickness of the wide paddle part?
They also appear to have a wide bevelled edge. Is it bevelled on 1 side only OR both sides?
Finish?
Thanks in advance for any and all replies.

I've made a couple dozen of pizza paddles. I made them as gifts for friends and family one Christmas. They are very straight forward to make and I'll tell you what I did.

First sizing. The other posters were correct about having the opportunity to size the paddle to your oven. One of my friends has a funky Agga oven. It's fairly rare here in North America and the ovens are narrow and deep. Normal paddles wouldn't have worked for him. For most people though, a paddle around 15"x15" is about right. I find that the paddles available for consumer purchase have too short of handles. I made most of mine about 15-16" long. A few friends wanted really long handles and those were around 3' +/-.

Wood choice. You have multitudes of choices of woods. I mixed mine on all the paddles. Handle (straight piece from tip to stern) one type and the paddle sides another. I used Cherry, Purpleheart, maple among others. Cherry is my personal favorite for the paddle sides. The swirling grain patterns are really fun.

Build. I cut rough sized pieces of 3/4" stock and resawed them on my bandsaw to a little under 3/8". Then I glued up the 3 pieces using standard wood glue. I have a Plano press that helped considerably with keeping the paddles flat but I'm sure you'll fine with besseys or other. If I had a wide enough thickness planer I would have passed them through a couple of times after glue up to get down to handle thickness (thickest part of finished product - about 1/4"). I didn't, so I did the rough sand with my stationery wide belt sander. I made a simple pattern for all the paddles and transfered this to each glue up. I cut it out roughly on the bandsaw and then to disk sander and random orbital sander to finish the shape. Finally back to belt sander. This part is time consuming. Probably 15 minutes per paddle. You want dust collection here as you make a lot of dust. taper the paddle from the handle thickess at the back to maybe an 1/8" at the tip. Give a quick 1" edge to both sides so the blade of the paddle is virtually sharp. Keep the center (handle) a little thicker than the sides.

Finish. I don't remember if I put any finish on the paddles. I don't think so. They get oiled up over time from oils on your hands and pizzas of course. Don't immerse your paddles in water. Wipe down with damp cloth and put away.

All the paddles I've made are still in use and are proudly displayed in most of my friends and families homes.

[Chris Padilla]

Mmmmmm, pizza....*drool*.....