Pizza Party Poolside

[RTflorida]

Richard, I experienced the same thing last weekend in doing 5 pies, my daughter and her boyfriend were a bit slow.....they seemed to listen about using plenty of flour on the peel, I think they just took too long - the flour absorbing moisture from the crust or the moisture in the crust making the flour damp (however you care to explain it). needless to say, I had 'goo' to burn off after their pies.

[Richard]

Ditto

While you can move coals over the goo to burn it off, it does slow down production. Find it difficult to 'spped peopleup" and yet still have it be a party. Do not want to tune this into a day at the office - wood burning oven is designed to make my life a bit slower and less stessful.

[Richie]

You guys are right on the pies sticking on the peels.

The first time it happened, like on the 3rd pizza, that guest ended up with a new style calzone. He said it was great but I think he was being polite.

What I did after that is I took the short 3 foot peels from the guests, stuck it in the oven as far as I could, then I used a longer 5 foot peel, slide the lip under the pizza and slid it off the lower (shorter) peel onto the floor of the oven (slowly). This worked fine, but it did slow it up and it didn't look as flash as sliding them straight in.

[RTflorida]

nice trick, I will certainly give that a try.

[Richard]

Are these wooden peels that you are using or metal?

I only have wooden peels and with the thickness of the lip do not see how I could get on to get under the pizza and slide off

anyone else have possible solutions?

[Richie]

Richard, they are metal peels. Tried it with my wooden one and I ended up with a calzone.

In regards to making dough for the party this is how we did it.

Friday night: 5 fireinds came over with 3 mixers and a bunch of beer. We made batches of 5 or 6 pies at a time with each mixer. Then we would split the batch into individual pies, put them in plastic bowls (cheap ones from the dollar store), wrapped them in plastic wrap, and stacked them in my wine cooler to rise overnight.

we started pulling out batches of five from the cooler around 4 to let them continue to rise before we started cooking them.