I’ve been working on bread lately. Here’s a good one!

I bought a peel on Amazon, and decided to try it out by making some pizza. I hoped the peel would help dough to stick less, but it was still thoroughly sticky. Either I’m not using enough cornmeal or I have to grease it or something, or it sticks, and that sucks, especially when you go to slide a pizza into a hot oven and the toppings slide off instead. So I read about a trick with parchment paper that should hopefully work for all sorts of stone-cooked things. You place the dough on a piece of parchment paper on top of the peel, and it slides straight off onto the stone. The stone’s hot enough to bake the bottom of the crust through the paper; parchment paper can withstand the high heat for a few minutes. After waiting a couple minutes for a crust to form, pick up the pizza a bit with the peel and slide the paper out, so the crust is right against the stone, and then just finish as usual. Very handy!

After making some dough and letting it rise, this ball (B-A said it was “adoughable”):

Plus basil, chopped garlic, olive oil, and shredded mozzarella, became this:

And after a short failed peel experiment, came out like this:

You can see the streaks on the crust where some of the cheese slid off due to the sticky peel. It tasted really good, although it was a little high of an edge-to-topping ratio. It’s a nice meal and a good way to use up those mushrooms or peppers that are about to go bad in the fridge.