I have seen other suggestions below but I would like to suggest some semolina on the bottom of the pizza and on the oven itself. Keeps the vast majority of my pizzas from sticking
Some tips I’ve found for a successful launch with my Ooni… Immediately before launch, give the peel a little shake (horizontally, not vertically) to see if it slides. If it doesn’t, lightly lift up the corner of where it’s sticking, toss in a pinch of flour and try again. You can also blow under the corner, which will spread out the flour as well.
Mine aren’t perfectly round, but they’re getting better. And if true disaster strikes, fold it in half and tell the folks eating it you MEANT to try making calzones this time around…
Looks like perhaps you’re having trouble sliding the prepared pizza off your paddle onto the preheated stone in the oven. One solution is to put a bunch of cornmeal on the paddle before putting the dough on it, but this leads to a crust with a bunch of cornmeal on the underside. I prep my pizzas on a big sheet of parchment paper, which will easily slide on or off the paddle. When the pizza is halfway cooked, I spin it around 180° for even cooking and remove the piece of parchment paper at the same time.
I’m a pan of using 2 different peels when I’m making pizza. I build my pizza on a wooden (or whatever the stuff epicurean makes their cutting boards and such out of is) peel and use that to put the pizza into the oven. Then I take it out with a metal peel.
It my be my imagination, but I feel like an uncooked pizza slides off of a wooden peel more easily than a metal one, and the thinner metal one is better to slide under the pizza to pull it out.
Using 2 peels also makes it so that I can be building the pizza on one so it’s ready to go in as soon as the other pie is done and being pulled out. And since my pizza oven only makes about a 12" pie I’m usually making at least 2-4 pizzas at a go, more if I have guests.
That’s also the system they used at the pizzeria I used to work at. I was a delivery boy so I only ever made about a dozen pizzas there, but that gets me a bit nostalgic.
Do you have a ooni koda? How long do you preheat it again after one pie is done? My stone temp drops a bunch during cooking and I often found 10 minutes of heating are necessary to get back up to temp.
I actually have a breville pizzaiolo, so we’re talking a gas vs an electric oven in 2 different price ranges, so what works for me may not apply to you, but I don’t really worry about letting it re-preheat, I mostly just fire pizzas into it as fast as I can without rushing myself, and I haven’t noticed it hurting my pies any.
I probably wouldn’t have chosen the breville if I were shopping for a pizza oven, we lucked out an got one for free from a contest at my wife’s work, but after living with it for a few years, it’s pretty nice.
We did the corn meal on both. What happened with the first was the dough was stretched out too thin and spinning it caused it to tear a bit. Ended up folding the broke off bit on top of it
I started making pizza during COVID, and ended up with the same solution after failing with flour & parmesan. Of course, the parchment paper starts to smolder as soon as it hits the pizza stone (cast iron in my case). It gives the pizza a little bit of smoky paper flavor. I considered it an off flavor at first…but eventually I came to appreciate it.
The other day, my wife forgot a piece of parchment paper in the air fryer, and it got sucked to the element and singed. My mouth immediately started watering…
Parmesan? Surely that would just melt, wouldn’t it?
I heat my oven to 550°F (the highest it will go) before cooking my pizza, and that’s definitely more than enough Fahrenheits to burn parchment paper, but I turn the pizza around after 3 minutes and pull the paper out at the same time and that seems to be enough to keep the burned paper from becoming part of the flavor profile.
The best pizza I ever made was in an apartment I rented that had one of those really narrow, small gas ovens. I decided one day to use an oven thermometer to find out how hot it was actually getting on the high setting: over 700°F as it turned out. Great for pizza, maybe not so great for life expectancy.
Apparently parmesan works pretty well! I mean, the times I tried it were failures, but not due to parmesan, which didn’t burn (except the piece or two sticking out). It was a tip from a NY style pizza video, I think.
My only critique is too much sauce, although it’s totally possible that you like that amount of sauce, in which case, keep doing what you’re doing.
Something that helps the cheese not to slide off while eating is to put a thin layer of cheese on the bottom, then sauce on top, then more cheese on top of that. Alternatively, you can mix some cheese with the sauce first, then spread it and add more cheese on top.
Are you from Delco (Delaware County PA) by some chance? All the pizza places around here put like a half-thimbleful of sauce on a large. I have to order extra sauce just to get an actual observable quantity of sauce on a pie.
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