I love baking pizzas on the Big Green Egg. It's become a family friday mainstay. The problem though has been getting the darn thing in and out of the grill. So last week I went around town searching for a pizza peel and found two that were well priced and well made.
Whenever I go to a brick oven pizza place I notice that the guys making the pies always use wooden pizza peels which makes sense as the dough is less likely to stick then it would to another material such as metal. But why hate on metal? Wouldn't enough flour keep the dough form sticking? So I figured, "Hell. Let's break from the norm. Let's give metal a chance."
The wooden peel that I purchased is from a company called Ironwood Gourmet. It looks great. It's got a nice, wide surface area with a 14inch diameter and is 1/4 inch thick. I paid $18 for it.
The metal peel has a smaller surface area at 11inches and is only 2/16 of an inch thick and has a nice long handle. I picked this up at a restaurant supply store for only $10. (If you're interested in the manufacturer I will look it up)
After getting them home and cooking some pizzas I made a few surprising discoveries. To the notes!
To begin, I used the same amount of flour before putting the dough on and neither of the peels seemed to be stickier than the other. Metal does not seem to make a difference as long as you place enough flour on the surface area.
The size of the handle (keep your jokes to yourself) does not really matter. The one difference I really liked was the round handle of the metal peel over the squared handle of the wooden peel (Which I found is common to wooden peels).
The other thing I really liked about the metal peel is that the peel itself is super thin. Anyone who has a BGE knows that when you're trying to get a pizza on the pizza stone it's like trying to land a plane on an island that's the same size as the plane itself. And if you fall off you don't drown but get dragged into scorching hot magma.
The thinness of the metal peel made it much easier to slide the pizza on the stone and for getting the pizza off the stone. With the wooden peel being 1/4 inch thick, you need another tool to lift up an end of the pizza just to get the darn peel under it. There were a couple of times that I started to push the main course into the fire.
So there you have it. Make a dash to your local restaurant supply store and grab one or follow the link below. It will make baking pizzas a breeze.
