Last night I decided I was going to make a nice, thin crust, pesto-based chicken and olive pizza with mushrooms and red peppers. Mmmm, I thought, that sounds so good!
So I put the pizza stone in the oven to preheat, and went about rolling out the dough. Then I tossed it, as, well, you know, you are supposed to with pizza dough. And that went ok, but it was more than apparent that I’ve never worked in a pizza parlor.
As the stone preheated, I topped the pizza with all the ingredients. So far, so good. Now it’s time to transfer the pizza to the stone.
That’s when it all pretty much fell apart… uh… literally.
See, we don’t have a pizza paddle. And even if we did, I don’t know if it would have helped. So we had the pizza on a wood cutting board, and we approached the oven and tried to transfer the pizza to the stone.
The pizza wouldn’t budge. So we used a spatula to try to urge the pizza forward. That didn’t work either. It was about that time that my bird decided she needed to help, and she flew over by the hot, open 500 degree oven. I grabbed her and took her, protesting, into her cage to avoid burnt feathers.
We then tried the pizza transfer again. We succeeded this time – if you consider sucess to be transfering most of the ingredients to the bottom of the oven, and the rest of the ingredients to the pizza stone, while the crust still stubbornly clung to the cutting board.
By this time the crust was a mess, the ingredients were all over the kitchen, and our tempers were running very short.
Eventually we took the stone out of the oven, scraped the toppings off the stone, forcibly placed the very misshapen crust onto the stone, threw the ingredients back onto the crust and put the stone back in the oven.
Despite all that, the pizza turned out ok. Click the link below to see the lessons we learned:
- Make the pizza smaller -or-
- Make two pizzas rather than one large one
- Never try this again without a pizza paddle
- Make sure the bird is in the cage before attempting the pizza transfer
- Have a bottle of wine open and readily accessible for use before, during and after the entire procedure.
- Pizza parlor employment probably isn’t in my future
- Perhaps delivery isn’t such a bad option after all.
Popularity: 1% [?]
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Irene,
Don’t give up — I make thin crust pizzas all the time, and everyone loves them! It just takes a couple times to get the swing of things. I put a little cornmeal on a cookie sheet before gently pulling (not rolling) out the dough, set the pizza dough on the cornmealed cookie sheet (jiggle it around a bit to make sure it isn’t sticking anywhere), add a light layer of toppings, and the pizza should slide right onto your hot pizza stone. Good luck! -h
Thanks for the tips! I’ll keep them in mind if I’m ever brave enough to try this again!
I’m so glad it’s not just me that has the occasional cooking disaster!
It’s all in the marketing, though – you just convince everyone that you deliberately made it that shape, to emulate a flag waving in the breeze for Independence Day.