Posted on

How to cook wood fired oven style pizza in your home oven in 20 minutes

Last night I planned to fire up the wood fired oven for a pizza party. I had my dough balls and ingredients ready and laid out, and even made a new peel for the occasion! The only problem was that when it came time to cook pizzas, my oven was too wet from all of the rain we’ve been having (I should really stop procrastinating and render the oven so that it doesn’t get waterlogged in the rain, but that’s another story).

Wondering how I could feed the hungry hordes without even having a pizza stone preheated in my inside oven, I remembered something else I read on the net a while back and thought I’d give it a try. It worked so well that I wanted to share it so that you too can have a backup plan if you need to cook some emergency pizzas one day!

You will need

  • Pizza dough, sauce, other toppings (obviously)
  • A cast iron skillet (frying pan with a metal handle)
  • An oven with a grill (broiler)

How it works

  1. Put your skillet on your stovetop burner and preheat it on high heat for 15 minutes
  2. Turn on your grill and leave it long enough that you can see it glowing (if using an electric grill, gas versions won’t need to preheat)
  3. Prepare your pizza on a floured peel, making sure that your base is not larger than the base of the skillet
  4. Using oven mitts or a tea towel, take your skillet off the burner and turn it upside down. Slide your pizza onto the skillet.
  5. Quickly place the pizza + skillet on an oven rack below the grill. The top of the pizza should be 2-3 inches below the grill.
  6. Watch the pizza as it cooks, you can easily overcook if you aren’t careful. The pizza should take 2-3 minutes to cook. You may need to rotate your pizza 180 degrees half way through cooking.
  7. Before cooking your next pizza, return the skillet to the hotplate for a few minutes to reheat the base. Or use 2 skillets, alternating so that you don’t have to wait between pizzas.

This method works because the pizza is cooked evenly at a very high heat from above and below, similar to a wood fired oven. The pizzas were actually quite close in appearance to those from my wood oven, although the sides of the crust did not cook quite so evenly. But this trick is absolutely worth adding to your home made pizza arsenal!

NOTE: be very careful as the handle of the skillet will be very hot. Wear oven mitts and use a tea towel when lifting te pizza. This should only be done under adult supervision.

Posted on

Pizza peel tips and tricks

A pizza peel is a kind of wood or metal paddle, used to slide a pizza into the oven, move and turn it while cooking, and take it out again when it’s done. Pizza peels allow you to make a pizza in advance, then slide it directly onto a pizza stone to cook, without damaging the base or disturbing the toppings. This is a critical skill to master for wood fired ovens, where pizzas are placed deep in a very hot oven. Peels are very useful for home pizza cooking as well, but a shorter handled peel like this one will do the job.

The best peel for home use is a wooden one. A wooden pizza peel will help slide you pizzas without sticking, as the wood absorbs some of the moisture from the base and stops it from sticking. The worst disaster is when your pizza sticks to the peel, changing its graceful slide into a messy cartwheel. This may well be how calzone was invented!

Before using a wood pizza peel, sprinkle some flour over it and then rub the flour into the wood. Over time, your peel becomes even more slippery as it builds up a coat of flour.

Once you have floured your peel, you simply place a prepared pizza base on it, add your toppings, and slide it into the oven!

TIPS:

  • It can be useful to keep several peels, so you can prepare a few pizzas at once and put each into the oven as soon as the last is cooked.
  • Instead of using wheat flour on your peel, try using white rice flour. This is less prone to absorb moisture and become sticky, and it is also less likely to burn on the pizza stone. I keep a small shaker of rice flour handy for this purpose.
  • If your pizza sticks to the peel, try quickly but carefully shaking the peel back and forth. If this doesn’t work, try lifting the spot where it is sticking and brushing some flour underneath.
  • If you don’t have a peel, you can use a flat cookie tray, turned upside down. If you do, don’t leave the pizza sitting on it for too long as it may stick! Or, try making your own.