Nothing inspires a cook more than a kitchen equipped with advanced, essential tools. When it comes to preparing pizza, the best tools can make a big difference in the results. A pizza baked in an oven will seldom taste as delicious as an authentic wood-fired one. From the dough to the toppings and sauce, every ingredient and cooking technique makes a difference in both presentation and taste. Check out a few ways to prepare the best pizza with convenient, modern tools.
Digital Kitchen Scale
Accuracy in measuring ingredients is the trick to the best pizzas. A kitchen scale serves better than a measuring cup in many ways. It’s the dry ingredients that make a difference in the cooking and rising of the dough. Be accurate about the grams and kilos with a reliable kitchen scale.
Ever seen Ozeri? It is elegant, digital-savvy, lightweight and precise. The automatic unit button helps you convert pounds into kilos and an easy-to-read LCD screen makes viewing a breeze. It subtracts the weight of your container to give you exact measurements of your ingredients. Batteries and automatic power-off after two minutes makes it kitchen-friendly and cool. Best of all, it is inexpensive and comes in several colours.
Dough Scraper
A dough scraper is a handy kitchen aid. It scrapes off every bit of dough while kneading, helps you cut dough without getting it sticky, helps you portion out the exact amounts and unlike knives, don’t stick to the dough. Dough scrapers keep your fingers clean too. The scraper set by Prepatize helps you reduce preparation time and effort.
Evenly Heated Pizza Stone
A pizza stone beats a pan to prepare pizzas. The ceramic material of pizza stone allows uniform heating and the pre-heated porous surface pulls out water from the moist dough while cooking to help you get that perfectly crispy, puffed up crust that a pan seldom achieves. It makes the difference between a good and great slice of pizza.
A pizza cooked on a baking sheet is likely to burn at the bottom because the heating is not uniform. The dough in the centre is usually soggy and sticky in a pan. See the difference a pizza stone makes!
Modern pizza stones are not circular. They are rectangular or heart-shaped. You can use them to cook anything that needs uniform heating such as loaves of bread or fish.
Make sure you buy the right pizza stone. Not all provide uniform heating. If they don’t, your pizza can crack. Use Old Stone Oven rectangular pizza available on Amazon crafted from lead-free clay. It absorbs heat and transfers it evenly and helps you create restaurant-style perfect pizzas and breads. Use proper oven mitts to pull pull out your work of art.
Pizza steel plate from Pizzacraft also retains heat well, even better than a pizza stone and allows quicker cooking time. Do take care to keep them rust-free though, just like cast iron.
Wood Fired Pizza Oven
Ooni’s wood-fired pizza oven is the world’s first portable one. It flame-cooks in 60 seconds flat at 900 degrees. It’s more suitable for cooking 13” individual pizzas, not an extra-large family-sized pizza but it’s great when you have guests over and you need smaller portions. Use a good pizza cutter to slice them into equal pieces. OXO Good Grips 4” Pizza wheel cutter is sharp, features a non-slip grip, and dishwasher safe.
Make sure you use the freshest vegetables and meats for your pizza. If you’re craving a homemade pizza crafted to perfection but are in no mood to bake it yourself, hop over to Stan’s Pizza Joint for a treat in Burnaby, BC. We serve authentic homestyle Italian dishes and thin-crust delicious pizzas at fair prices, served piping hot from our classic stone oven.