Food Handling Tools Wood Fired Pizza Ovens🔥
OK, so let's talk about how you're going to get your food into the oven, move it around in there and then get it out...
Pizza Peels Square - Round - Rectangular
We make three main face shapes for our pizza shovels / pizza paddles / pizza peels. WOW, saying pizza shovels / pizza paddles / pizza peels each time is going to get boring superfast! From now on, I’m just gonna say pizza shovels / pizza paddles / pizza peels the first time I mention them in a section, then (positively un-Australian as it is) I’m gonna go with the correct terminology and call them pizza peels from then on, OK? Phew, glad we got that bit of editorial drama out of the way! SO: the main thing you want from your pizza peel is that it’s good for landing (OH, editorialising AND techo terms in the first paragraph, this promises to be a good read doesn’t it?!)…
A pizza peel is the tool that you use to get your pizza - or baking tray or bread or maybe your pizza-on-a-tray if you’ve still got your training wheels on 🙂 - from the bench, into the oven and onto the oven floor. It’s the Big Kahuna tool and possibly the only oven tool you’ve heard of if you’re new to the game (boy are YOU in for a surprise if that’s the case!).
SO: choosing between the 3 standard Pizza Peels depends a little bit on the size of your oven, but mostly it depends on what you cook most in it and how many people you cook for. Also, as with all our stuff, don’t forget, because we do actually make the babies ourselves, you don’t have to stick with these standard shapes and sizes. We can (and do!) make peels whatever size and shape you want ‘em. Not that I’m daring you to come up with something different here mind! Most of the time, unless you have a really unusual oven or very specific cooking habits, one of these three standard shapes will see you right.
The Square Faced Pizza Peel
This is by far our most popular pizza peel. I reckon about 60% of people select this peel face. At 31 cm wide by 31 cm long, it’s big enough to hold a decent sized pizza or a flat baking tray or a nice big cobb loaf, but it’s not so big that if you’re cooking for the multitude and have a number of pizzas or trays in your oven at the same time that you can’t manoeuvre between them. At the risk of confusing things even further (have you noticed yet how good I am at that?!) it may be square but it’s the all-rounder: perfect for people who, while they may mostly do pizzas, plan to do a bit of everything in their oven (like tray work and bread baking too).
The Round Faced Pizza Peel
This is one for the pizza purists. About 30% of people choose this peel face. At 31 cm in diameter it will hold the same sized pizza as the standard square, but the shape makes it less… ‘forgiving’ shall we say, of those of us whose pizzas turn out more freeform in shape. In our house, this peel is Pete’s pizza weapon of choice, but that’s because he takes the time to shape his pizzas perfectly round and makes them the same size every time. I, on the other hand, tend to be a bit more haphazard in my approach (I like to think I’m looser and more artistic, but I expect it’s really because I’ve had more to drink and/or am busy listening to/contributing to salacious gossip amongst our guests and I want to get back to both activities as soon as possible!) and thus, the square works better for me.
The Rectangular Faced Pizza Peel
This is one for the big bread bakers. It’s the same width as the square face (31 cm) but it’s 4 cm longer, meaning it will take a rectangular loaf (or maybe even two at once) and if you’re baking oven loads of bread at a time, a fast load is a good load, as you’re pretty focused on keeping that heat in. The other folk who use these are the non-pizza people (I know you’re shocked, but there are actually some out there!). These people do other stuff in their oven, like roasting - and not that you'd put a roasting pan with a big joint of meat on it on a peel to pull it out of the oven: that’s a really cumbersome way to hold weight (Particularly when you can buy a perfectly good pan hook for that and on this website too!) but there’s other sorts of roasting, like flat tray bakes and chicken wings and fish parcels and sausage rolls and roast veggies, etc.
Then there’s pies and desserts, like meringues (fantastic in the low, slow heat of a cooling oven) and cheesecakes (ditto). All of which can be landed in the oven and removed from it on a peel. Not that the square peel or even the round peel won’t handle a good sized tray - all our babies are built to take a load 🙂 - but if that’s all you’re doing with it, the rectangular face might be the go for you, particularly if you’ve got a big oven. Again though, not that big oven necessarily equals big peel face, as big ovens often equal busy ovens and if it is a busy oven, then getting between things is the priority, but certainly, the rectangular peel face is not so useful in a smaller oven or one with a narrower doorway…
OK, so you with me so far?
Main thing you want a pizza peel for is landing your food and we do three main pizza peel faces, each one suited to different landing tasks...
PLEASE NOTE: this you tube clip shows the rectangular pizza peel (and a very old one at that!). You can really see how big it is BUT please remember that bigger is not necessarily better: if you mostly do pizza and you often cook for a crowd, it’s possible all that extra length will do for you is reduce your visibility and get in the way/make it hard to get between things, particularly if your oven chamber is under 900 mm dia.
Pizza Peel Standard Dimensions
Pizza Peel Features
- Large stainless steel ring, suits a wide variety of hooks and hangers
- Solid brass etched nameplate
- Fire hardened qwilla hardwood handle
- Food grade 1.6mm thick stainless steel plate
- Solid brass 25 mm screws for good grip - no wobbly handles, ever
- Brass capped stainless steel rivets
- Slightly sharpened working edge for easy sliding
As well as the standard size referred to here, pizza peels (and all other tools) can be made to your specifications and oven size. We have a Guide to Measuring Your Oven.
Tools can also be personalised with your wording engraved into the handles.
Turning Tools Spinning Peel - Trowel
There is however another task you can want your pizza peel to do though and that’s turn your pizzas whilst their cooking. Now, all the Pizza Peels can be used to turn your pizzas around if they’re cooking unevenly or move them to another spot if they’re cooking too slowly or if they’re too close to the fire and cooking too quickly, but the round face, because of its shape, is far and away the best turner, so if pizza is your game and you party hard (pretty much always entertaining 10 plus people) and you don’t have the budget for a dedicated turning tool, definitely go the round as your main/only peel.
Why does it matter how many people I’m feeding, you may ask? Well, you see, pizzas cook pretty fast in a pizza oven (between 1 and 2 minutes, once you’re up to speed) and so if your parties are smaller, more intimate affairs with 8-10 people usually, then you only need to be cooking one or two pizzas in your oven at once to keep up with even the hungriest of guests, so in a normal sized oven, with only one or maybe two pizzas in there, there’s plenty of room between the pizzas and the square will cope well enough with getting between them for landing and turning. It’s only when the place is jumping and you’re cooking lots of pizzas and more than two at a time (particularly in a smaller oven), that you need either the round OR a dedicated turning tool to take over this job…
We offer two turning tool options: one specifically for this job only (the Spinning Peel) and one (The Trowel) that’s a bit more of a general tool.
The Spinning Peel / Turning Peel
The spinning peel is what the pro’s use for turning their pizzas. It’s got a little round 20 cm diameter face and a low profile and you slide it in under the edge of the pizza and lift it up or tilt it a bit and that allows you to spin that baby like a record (of course that analogy only works if you’re old enough to remember that a record turns easily, the other alternative saying though: turning on a dime, ain’t much more relevant though these days either is it?!).
You’ll notice in the pictures that the spinner has a half metal handle on it? Well this is because originally we only did spinners for those big old commercial ovens (which are like 1.8 metres plus deep) and if you’ve got that sort of oven and are doing this commercially, then often you leave the spinner in there permanently for the whole of service. So we started doing these half metal handles to protect the spinners from the constant heat but we also found that this method of attaching the head made them really low profile and so when we started doing them for domestic ovens, well, we left them the same.
PLEASE NOTE: YouTube clip for the spinning peel coming soon!
Spinning Peel Standard Dimensions
Spinning Peel Features
- Large stainless steel ring, suits a wide variety of hooks and hangers
- Solid brass etched nameplate
- Fire hardened qwilla hardwood handle
- Food grade 1.6mm thick stainless steel plate
- Solid brass 25 mm screws for good grip - no wobbly handles, ever
- Brass capped stainless steel rivets
- Slightly sharpened working edge for easy sliding
- Half metal handle to make tool really low profile: great for spinning!
As well as the standard size referred to here, spinning peels (and all other tools) can be made to your specifications and oven size. We have a Guide to Measuring Your Oven.
Tools can also be personalised with your wording engraved into the handles.
The Trowel
The other, more general option for a pizza turning tool is the trowel. It’s the tool that looks like a plasterer’s trowel and the face is 18 cm wide by 28 cm long. Now, we actually invented the trowel (well, co-opted our plasterer’s trowel really!) before we even knew there was such a thing as a spinning peel and (immodest as it sounds!) most of the time (particularly for home cooks), I think it’s actually the better option, because it is a multipurpose tool: not only does it turn pizzas well, but having a point on the end means it also lets you lift the edge of your pizza up easily so you can see how it’s cooking underneath and it also assists you with all those other poking and prodding jobs that you need to do in an oven (lifting a roast up and turning it over or transferring it to another tray or flipping naan or flat bread or turning over a whole pile of roast potatoes or other vegetables so they crisp up on the other side, etc).
These tasks may sound really petty when said out loud or written down, but they're exactly the sort of annoying little jobs that tempt you to use your hands or a tea towel or something else that's going to burn or melt (like our plastic salad servers did in about 2 seconds) because you're too lazy or impatient to get the peel out or put your 10 kilo asbestos oven mitts on just to do that one little thing…
OH, ‘cause that’s the other thing about the trowel. I haven’t discussed tool length at all so far (don’t worry though, there’s a whole section on it a’coming!) but usually the trowel is a smaller tool (between 65 cm and 90 cm total length), meant to be kept on the bench or somewhere close by and able to be used one handed. If you go any bigger than 900 mm total length, you kind of defeat the purpose of it being a smaller tool and you can’t use it one handed. Because of this, if your oven is getting up there (reach measurement over 1300-1500 mm and above, depending on the configuration), then you need to start looking at the spinning peel instead, but under that size/if it gets you far enough back, the trowel is definitely the way to go.
PLEASE NOTE: the trowel in this YouTube clip is only 600 mm total length. Mostly these days 650 mm is the minimum with a lot done up at 900 mm (the max size you can have them and still use them one handed).
Trowel Standard Dimensions
Trowel Features
- Large stainless steel ring, suits a wide variety of hooks and hangers
- Fire hardened qwilla hardwood handle
- Food grade 1.6mm food grade stainless steel plate
- Solid brass 25 mm screws for good grip - no wobbly handles, ever
- Solid brass etched nameplate
- Brass capped stainless steel rivets
- At 18 cm wide, the plate is large enough to hold pizza trays and even move baking pans about, but small enough not to be 'overkill' on a muffin
- Pointy end for lifting up pizza edge to check underneath, also easy to slide under and flip pita and naan bread, etc AND it also makes it great for spinning pizza!
As well as the standard size referred to here, trowels (and all other tools) can be made to your specifications and oven size. We have a Guide to Measuring Your Oven.
Tools can also be personalised with your wording engraved into the handles.
Other Food Tools
In other food tools, if you’re planning some serious roasting/baking/casseroling action, you should definitely think about how you’re gonna move those pans around in your oven…
The Pan Hook / Bubble Popper
The pan hook for your wood fired pizza oven is not rocket science and it won't change your life (well not majorly anyway!), it just is what it is - a hook for your pans.
It's a pretty good pan hook though, nice and strong - it's never going to wobble or let go.
Also, if you look along it from the handle end, you’ll see that the hook isn't 'down' from the end of the handle, it's centred on it, so you've got a lot more control and don't need to jerk around trying to lasso your pans from over the top; you can kind of 'sneak' up on them and catch them quietly.
And the pan hook itself is deep, so you can get a decent grip on your pans and both 'pull' and 'push' them around.
We should probably also mention that the sides of the pan hook are really steep so you can get into really tight corners and through all sorts of funny handles, though you probably don't want to get me started on the many stupid handles there are on baking pans!
The pan hook has also got a kind of point at the end that means you can put on and take off lids without fear of disaster and even get under those stupid handles mentioned above and the matching stupid lids (and you really don't want to get me started on stupid lids!) that fall back flat against the pan...
OH, nearly forgot to mention that the pan hook, like the trowel, is also just all round handy: you can pop the bubbles in your pizza base with it, you can nudge logs around, you can break burning logs up into coals, you can wrap a damp rag around it and use it to ‘mop’ your oven floor. It’s a handy little fella!
⚠ Tracy's Special Note ⚠
Finally, I would also like to take this opportunity to mention that, for shipping, we put a small offcut piece of timber over the hook end. This little offcut is from the sanded and oiled handled timber and so it looks pretty nice really and so we’ve had lots of instances where people haven’t actually realised 😲 that it’s basically just packaging and they need to take it off before they use their hook! Having to explain this to someone who writes and says they wanted the ‘other’ pan hook or who has sent in a photo of their tools up on a rack with the timber offcut still on embarrasses us both 😉, so just wanna get it out of the way before it ruins a beautiful friendship!
Like we said, it's not rocket science, but how does what you're using measure up?
Pan Hook Standard Dimensions
Pan Hook Features
- Large stainless steel ring, suits a wide variety of hooks and hangers
- Fire hardened qwilla hardwood handle
- Solid brass 25 mm screws for good grip - no wobbly handles, ever
- Solid brass etched nameplate
- Brass capped stainless steel rivets
- Long, 8 mm thick food grade stainless steel rod handle and hook for both strength and manoeuvrability
- Steep sided and centred hook gives great control and allows you to move pans in any direction
- Pointed end lets you deal easily with all sorts of lids and handles
As well as the standard size referred to here, pan hooks (and all other tools) can be made to your specifications and oven size. We have a Guide to Measuring Your Oven.
Tools can also be personalised with your wording engraved into the handles.
