Making perfect restaurant-grade pizza at home - this pizza peal is part of it.
Here's the solution I found for a very useable home-based gas-grill pizza oven. This is the key to crispy chewy pizza thin-crusts, and tastes just as good as any wood-fired pizza restaurant (think Wolfgang Puck or California Pizza Kitchen). Oh, and the pizzas are far cheaper to make.The Dough: (told to me by a professional restaurateur) use any basic yeasted pizza dough recipe from the internet. Nothing special, no special flours or ingredients needed, just white flour, yeast, salt, sugar, water, a bit of oil. The key is to let the yeast over-rise. Yes - give it a couple hours, maybe punch it down a couple times. But let those little yeast buggers eat up every bit of sugar they can find. I often throw in a quarter cup of gluten flour which I suspect makes the dough extra stretchy, but I haven't compared this side-by-side, so I may be kidding myself. Roll it out and transfer the dough to this wooden pizza peal. Use plenty of corn grits or corn meal underneath to allow it to slide around. You’ll need this to maneuver it into the grill, which is a small trick but very learnable. I've learned to scootch the completed dough & toppings around on the peal with short quick horizontal shakes. (don't overdo it, or you’ll dump your hand-crafted pizza on the floor). Also try to keep the peal as dry as possible, i.e. don't get sloppy with the sauce, and use plenty of cornmeal.The Pizza-oven on the Grill: restaurant-quality pizza needs to sit in heat that's around 700 degrees F or even higher. Guess what - your typical home oven doesn't go that high!! Not even close. And you need that heat being strongly radiated from top and bottom. Otherwise, you'll burn the bottom waiting for the cheese to melt and bubble. Solution: buy a case of untreated simple clay flooring tiles. Make sure it’s untreated (no glaze, no decorations, no designs, you want the smooth surfaced ones). Home Depot sells 6 inch square tiles for about $30 bucks a case (30 pcs). Buying two commercial-made pizza stones will set you back more than $100, and if (more like when) they crack, you have to buy a new one. My pizza oven on a gas grill uses 16 of these tiles, and I've cracked a couple in the last year - easy to replace from the remainder of the tiles in the case. You need both a top layer and bottom layer of these tiles. To hold up the top layer, I use four standard clay bricks (also untreated), and some basic steel slats (from Home Depot). Put down one layer of tiles, and the bricks on edge on each end. Lay the slats across the bricks, and build the upper tile layer on top of the slats. You’ll have a heat compartment about 4 inches high, and as deep and wide as your grill will allow. I trained an IR temperature gun on the inside of the tile compartment built inside a natural gas-fired grill and it clocked in at about 750F, after heating up. That's a lot of thermal mass, so give a good 30-45 minutes to get up to temp. If you use a propane grill, it’ll get hotter than that. No worries - just watch closely and pull your pizza out sooner when it looks done. Either way, you’re going to be cooking pizzas for about 3-4 minutes instead of 10 or 15. (more on that later).The Method: I found (the hard-way) that you need two pizza peals – one wood (to put in) and one metal (to take out). I first only bought the metal peal (Kitchen Supply 14-Inch x 16-Inch Aluminum Pizza Peel with Wood Handle), but found that metal just grabs wet pizza dough and you can’t easily get the pizza to slide off into the hot oven. You wind up having to use your fingers or a spatula, neither of which is well suited for 750F. Using the handle only, you want to be able to slightly shake the peal and gently scootch the pizza off onto the grill. Metal isn’t suited for that. So I ended up with a wooden peal (New Star Foodservice 50394 42-Inch Wooden Pizza Peeler with 20-Inch by 22-Inch Blade). That worked perfectly. Now I roll out the dough, move it to the wooden peal (lots of cornmeal/grits underneath), build the pizza (sauce, toppings) while it’s on the peal. Then take it directly to the oven and slide/scootch it in, and close the lid. THEN SET YOUR WATCH. This is important. If you’re used to it taking 10 or 15 minutes to bake a pizza, you’ll find your perfect creation to be a burnt mass of carbon if you wait that long. Depending on how hot your grill is and how thick you made your pizza, you’ll only need about 3-4 minutes before taking it out. This is where the metal peal comes in. The wooden unit is actually fairly thick (1/2” or so). It’s not going to easily get underneath the baked pizza, and after awhile, jamming the wooden peal on top of 750F tiles isn’t going to leave it in very good shape. That’s where the thin metal blade of the other peal comes in. It’s perfect taking out the hot pizza and leaving the tiles in good shape for the next one.That’s it – two pizza peals, one gas grill, a case of tile, some bricks and steel slats. You have all the makings of a perfect commercial grade pizza oven.