Why does my pizza stick?
You have a new pizza oven, a batch of dough and a hot oven. The pizza is on the peel, but it will not slide off. Is the peel no good? Probably not. There are four common reasons.
Did the pizza wait too long?
The best order: stretch the base, spread the sauce, add the toppings, put the pizza on the peel and slide it straight into the oven.
If a topped pizza sits on the worktop too long, the dough gets wetter, for example from the tomato sauce. The moisture soaks through to the worktop and weakens the dough, so it tears when you move it or sticks to the peel.
Pro tip: top each pizza just before it goes in. With a home pizza oven that is often necessary anyway, because the stone needs time to heat up again after the previous pizza.
Was the peel hot?
This happens when you bake several pizzas in a row. Raw dough gets sticky when it touches something hot, so it will not slide off a warm peel. Three ways around it:
- Share a pizza with your friends while the next one is in the oven, so the peel can cool down.
- Use a second peel to turn the pizza and take it out, so the one you use to put pizzas in stays cool.
- Use a turning peel for turning the pizza in the oven.
What should I put under the dough?
Dust the worktop when you stretch the dough. Without anything, a good pizza is almost impossible. You can use flour, semolina or cornmeal; in a pizza oven, flour works least well.
- Semolina
- Coarse and very good at stopping the dough from sticking. Choose the coarser kind.
- Cornmeal
- Coarse, made from corn, and sticks to the dough a lot less than flour. A perforated peel lets the excess fall through.
- Flour
- Fine, so a lot of it is absorbed by the dough and sticks to it. It also burns quickly in a hot pizza oven. In a normal kitchen oven, flour is fine.
Is the peel damaged?
A peel with a damaged or rough surface can make the pizza stick. If that is the case, replace it, and use the tips above to make sliding the pizza into the oven easy.