Kaylin and I have been getting more into making our own pizza since quarantine started. We started getting better results when we switched from store bought to homemade dough. We’ve been baking the pizzas on cooking trays, which I suspected was holding us back. They simply insulate too much to develop a good and crispy crust.
And so we purchased a pizza stone. The process of using a pizza stone involves letting it heat up in the oven for a while, which means you need some way to transfer the raw floppy pizza to the stone. What you need is a pizza peel, which is basically just spatula big enough for a pizza. You prepare your pizza on the pizza peel, then shimmy it from the pizza peel to the pizza stone in the oven. When baking is complete, you again use the pizza peel to retrieve the pizza from the stone.
After doing a bit of research on off the shelf pizza peels, I realized that wood is a popular material. And hey, I’m good at making stuff out of wood, so I set out to make one myself.
I made the pizza peel out of two pieces of scrapwood: an old cabinet door from unused kitchen cabinets for the main body, and an offcut of maple for the handle. The process was pretty simple:
- Break apart the cabinet door, and plane off the old finish.
- Sketch out and cut a pleasant shape for the handle.
- Route out and refine a dovetail type recess for the handle to mate to the main body.
- Join the handle to the main body with glue and dowels.
- Refine the shape of the handle with the bandsaw for rough removal, rasps for shaping, and sandpaper for blending everything together.
- Apply 4 coats of food safe mineral spirits finish.
The finished product measure ~17” wide, by ~14.5” deep, with a ~13” handle.
This was a really fun project! I was able to complete ~90% of it in a single afternoon, and it was my first real chance to work with organic curved surfaces. The finished piece works like a charm and looks quite nice. Between the pizza stone and the pizza peel, our pizza game has definitely leveled up!
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