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. If you use a propane grill, it’ll be hotter than that. 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.
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From the manufacturer
Aluminum Pizza Peel
Game night... movie night... or just a night by yourself with your favorite red wine, pizza is the swiss army knife of foods that just fits occasion.
And whether you're throwing in a frozen pizza or rolling your own dough - cooking in the oven or on the grill - this pizza peel will give you the outcome you were looking for.
Its smooth surface and long handle lets you get your pizza in and out quickly so you can be on to better things... like eating it.
This item works well in tandem with our best-selling Honey-Can-Do pizza stones (Item #4461 and #4467).
Product Features
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Reinforced handle provides added stability |
Long handle keeps you away from heat source when removing pizza |
Pizza peel dimensions |
Honey-Can-Do Pizza
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16-inch round pizza stoneItem #4461. |
14x16-inch rectangular pizza stoneItem #4467. |
Easy glide pizza cutterItem #1142. |
About Us
Honey-Can-Do International, LLC, was founded in 2008 and has been growing rapidly ever since, demonstrated by our multi-year position on the Crain’s Chicago Business 'Fast 50' list and our rise in the Inc. 5000. We are one of the largest employer and land owner in Berkeley, IL, and have 160 employees in the Chicago land area.
A storage and organization company whose mission is to rid the world of chaos one room at a time, Honey-Can-Do is a vendor-partner with nearly every major retailer in the United States who carry organization products as well as retailers in over 60 additional countries.
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Kitchenstar Stainless Steel Pizza Peel with Folding Handle
KitchenStar
Nice basic pizza peel. Only thing missing is a hole to hang it from.
Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2019
This is a nice sturdy no frills peel. The aluminium is solid and has no hint of wanting to fold or flop over, while still being thin enough for sliding under a pizza. For the reviews that mention it being sticky - just make sure you're flouring the sheet before you put your dough on it and it'll slide right off with no problem. You'd have to do the same thing with a wooden peel.The only thing missing on this peel is a hole to hang it from. It was a little annoying that it didn't have one but it took all of a minute to drill one.I will say that although the sheet portion of the peel looks like it'll last forever, the wooden handle and the metal piece that connects it do feel a bit cheap. They're solid enough and get the job done but I think the wood on our handle was barely sanded if at all and there's no finish at all applied to it. We had the same issue with ours that others have mentioned where the protective plastic coating had been applied to the sheet before the handle was attached. It made getting it all off cleanly a little difficult and you can't disconnect the handle to get the stuff underneath it because the handle is just kinda stamped to the sheet.Overall it's a nice peel that does what it's supposed to with no frills. The attention to detail could use some improvement but we've made dozens of pizzas with ours so far with zero issues and I'm glad we went with this peel instead of a thicker wooden one.
Reviewed in the United States on June 8, 2019
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Top reviews from other countries
Mark Whitlock
Aluminum, Bad choice on my part
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 19, 2019Andrew N
Lower quality than expected
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on July 17, 2019
Andrew N
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on July 17, 2019
Since I can easily fix these problems myself, it's not worth returning, but I expected better.
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Carla J.
Happy!
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 22, 2019
Carla J.
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 22, 2019
**update** I have used this pizza peel countless times now and love it. I wanted to be able to hang it so just drilled a small hole in the handle and added thin rope. So easy & works perfect!
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