What to do when your pizza sticks to the pizza peel?

You just got a new pizza oven with pizza peel, made a batch of pizza dough, and started to make your first pizza. The pizza oven is nice and hot. You got the pizza on the pizza peel, but it does not slide off in the pizza oven.

How is this possible, you have seen a lot of people just slide off the pizza into the pizza oven, what is going wrong. Is my pizza peel not good. Well, it could be a lot of things so let us see what could be wrong.

You finished making your pizza long before it goes in the pizza oven

When you are making pizza it is best to keep the following flow. Make the pizza base, put pizza sauce on it, and add the required pizza toppings like cheese and other ingredients. Then put the pizza on the pizza peel and slide it into the pizza oven.

If you leave your dough on the workbench too long after you have topped it. Then the dough becomes increasingly wetter, for example, due to the tomato sauce. This pulls through your pizza dough up to the worktop and also makes your dough less strong.

As a result, it will quickly break when you put your pizza dough on the shovel or harder to get it off. This is just something you don’t want.

So pro tip, finish your pizza just before it goes in the pizza oven. Often with home use pizza ovens, this is necessary because this gives the pizza stone in the oven time to regain its lost heat while baking the previous pizza.

Pizza on hot pizza peel

You place the unbaked pizza on a hot pizza peel. This problem might occur when baking multiple pizzas after each other because you want to eat at the same time. But the problem starts when you use a warm pizza peel, because the pizza dough will get sticky when it gets hot, so it will not slide off the pizza peel anymore.

But there is a quick solution for this:

1) share a pizza with your friends while a new one is in the pizza oven

2) get a second pizza peel that you use for turning the pizza and getting it out of the oven, so the one for putting pizza in the oven has time to cool.

3) use a pizza tuning peel, these smaller pizza peels are made for turning pizza in the oven

You are using the wrong or no product for stretching your pizza dough

Another reason for sticky pizza dough is when no or the wrong product is used. When you are going to make a pizza and want to unfold it, it is useful to use flour, semolina, or cornflour on your worktop. If you don’t use this, making a nice pizza is actually impossible.

All three can be used, although flour is the least suitable when you are baking your pizza in a pizza oven. Want to know more about the three options here we go:

Flour

Pizza flour is less suitable to use when spreading your pizza dough. Pizza flour has a fine texture and therefore will be absorbed by the dough, so a lot of flour will stick to your dough.

The flour will also burn quickly if you bake it at a higher temperature, just like you have in a pizza oven. If you are baking in a standard kitchen oven, you can use flour just fine.

Cornmeal

Cornmeal has a coarser texture, is made from corn, and sticks to your dough a lot less. After all, you only need it when stretching your dough. If you really want minimal cornmeal sticking to your dough, maybe think about a perforated pizza peel, this way excess cornmeal can fall through the perforations.

Semolina

Semolina has a coarse texture and is very good to use under your pizza dough to prevent it from sticking. With semolina, you can choose between fine and coarser grains. Again, it is better to choose a coarser variant of semolina.

A defect on your pizza peel

Maybe your pizza peel is not perfect anymore and this is causing the pizza to stick to the peel. If that is the case just buy a new pizza peel and you are done. With a new pizza peel, you can also use the tips we mentioned above to make dumping the pizza in the pizza oven a breeze.