The Super Peel

The Super Peel is a redesigned pizza peel. Instead of just being a flat bit of wood, it has a pastry cloth wrapped around it. A plastic rod makes this easy to rotate round the wood, and means that pizza, pastry or almost anything else can be slid smoothly on and off the peel. This works really well. If like me you have the digital dexterity of a newborn giraffe, this is invaluable.

A pizza peel, for those of you not aware of it, is the term for the thing you slide underneath the pizza in order to transfer it from the preparation surface to the oven, or vice versa. I've also seen it referred to as a pizza paddle. Why do you need one ? Well if you are serious about pizza baking you'll use either a pizza oven (ok - I'm not that serious) or a pizza stone, which is a terracotta or stone circle on which you bake the pizza, to get a crisper crust.

A pizza stone has to go in the oven to preheat, so you have to prepare your pizza on a nearby work surface. Then when you're ready you open the oven and you have to move the pizza onto the (incredibly hot) stone.

Now picking the pizza off the surface on which you prepare it is an acquired art. And I haven't acquired it. The problem is that when you start, the dough is easy to slide around, but by the time you've added the piles of mouth-watering ingredients to it, when you try and slide a normal pizza peel under one end, the dough sticks and you simply push it all into one messy heap. O.K. - you don't actually make one heap, but it takes a lot of lifting and sliding and messing around. By the time you finish the elegant work of art can easily be a mis-shapen mess. For the skilled cook I'm sure this is not a problem. For me it is.

With the Super Peel you simply slip it under one edge of the pizza and, as you slide it forward, pull back the plastic rod. The cloth lifts the pastry smoothly off the work surface and onto the the board. And it really is as easy to do as they say.

Even better, when you come to drop the pizza onto the stone, you reverse the process, and you drop it exactly where you want it. There's no difficulty getting the peel out from under it (as with greaseproof paper). There's no need for a skilful flick of the wrist to send the pizza sliding off the cornmeal ("whoops - missed") (Actually I miss that bit.) You just put the board where you want it and pull back.

The super peel should work equally well with pie crusts, pastry and I imagine other things too. Having seen how even my other half, as skilled a cook as you can imagine, can accidentally stretch a pie topping out of shape during the transfer process. I can see it being useful for cooks who don't cook pizza.

I can recommend this to anyone who likes doing pastry or pizza cooking who has even the least difficulty moving these around. It would also make an excellent kitchen gadget present. Gary Caspar has come up with a really useful device, which really seems to do what he says it does, and we wish him good luck with it.