From: Gael Fashingbauer Cooper <gaelfc@microsoft.com>
Subject: Pizza questions
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 1998 15:06:59 -0800
>I just received a pizza stone and peel for Christmas. I love the texture it
>lends to the crust, but have a few questions:
>
>1) My crust always seems to turn out too salty! Anyone have a great
>made-by-hand pizza crust recipe?
Jeff Smiths' latest book, "The Frugal Gourmet Cooks Italian" has a great
pizza recipe on page 266. If you can't find the book write back and
I'll try to scan this in. It's a couple of pages long; besides the rest
of the book is worth it.
>2) Any tips for successfully sliding the pizza from peel to stone? Do
>you put sauce, cheese and all the toppings on it while it's on the peel?
Yes, put the dough on the pizza peel AFTER you have generously sprinkled
it with corn meal. Shake it a little until it slides freely. THEN put
on the sauce, toppings and cheese.
Place it towards the back of the stone and make some SMALL jerks back
toward yourself until the back of the pizza is resting on the stone.
After that it will be easy to slide the peel out leaving the pizza on
the stone.
Two tips: 1. Have your oven as hot as you can get it. No, 550 degrees
is NOT too hot; a brick pizza oven gets up to 700 degrees.
2. Make sure that the stone is THOROUGHLY heated. This takes longer
than just heating the oven. I turn mine on at least 30 minutes ahead of
time.
>3) I have some baked cheese stuck to the stone. I know not to soap it,
>but any tips for cleaning the cheese off?
I have a bread dough scrapper that I have used. Good luck.
>
Homemade pizza is incredible. Experiment frequently. Don't worry about
the occasional failure; sometimes those taste fine too.
--
Bob Leonard, Jr. bleonard@bobleonard.com
http://www.bobleonard.com/