Top Tools for Making Pizza at Home
So, you’ve decided you want to make pizza at home. Good for you! There’s nothing wrong with trying to expand your culinary skills. Plus, making pizza at home will give you an excuse to host a pizza bar. But, before you even attempt to make pizza, you need to make sure you have the right pizza making tools.
Dough-Making Tools
Starting with the basis of all pizza – the dough. While you do need to learn the secrets of making pizza dough, you also have to make sure you have the right tools to make it happen. So, what are the dough-making tools necessary to knead your pizza base?
- A Digital Scale – Making pizza dough is highly scientific, and you need to make sure you weigh your ingredients before mixing them together.
- A Bench Scraper – All those random bits of dough that end up glued to your work surface won’t go anywhere if you don’t use a bench scraper to gather them up.
- A Mixer (Optional) – While you can definitely knead pizza dough by hand, a standing mixer can make everything much easier and faster.
Pizza Stones
Perhaps the best invention to date when it comes to at-home pizzas is the pizza stone. Pizza stones mimic the conditions in an actual brick oven, so you get the same crispy crust with the golden melted cheese you get when you order pizza. You have two options:
- A Baking Steel – It takes on the temperature and heats up to deliver a crispier crust and deeper char than your oven rack will ever give you.
- A Pizza Stone – You can probably use a tile for this, but pizza stones give you a crispier crust and that brick-oven pizza feel.
Pizza Peels
If you’ve ever reheated a whole pizza over your oven rack, you know what a pain in the neck it is to take the entire pizza out. Most likely, your pizza always ends split in half, with one half ending up all over your oven’s door. To avoid this, use a pizza peel. And, like many other things in this list, you have two options:
- Pizza Peel for Launching – Usually made out of wood, these peelers are what you use to take your pizza pie from the table to the oven.
- Pizza Peel for Retrieving – Wood peels are too thick to take out the pizza from the oven. Metal pizza peels are fine enough to slide under your freshly baked pizza.
Pizza Wheel
Sometimes we’re savages and don’t even worry about cutting our pizza. But, we try to behave when we have friends over, so having the right pizza cutter is essential for entertaining. And, you bet, you also have two options!
- Pizza Scissors – These are not your average scissors. They are scissors specially designed to cut pizza. Sharp and with a thicker side to hold your pizza slice as you cut, this is the perfect option when you’re going for a do-it-yourself kind of serving.
- Pizza Wheel – There's always the traditional pizza cutter. You use this one when you and only you decide how big the pizza slices are going to be.
Pizza Oven
Okay, we’re not saying you need to have a Neapolitan-like pizza oven at home. But, you do need a good oven that will give your pizza that crispy crust. Your conventional oven will do just fine, and if you use the pizza stones, you can get a better-quality pizza at home. But, when it comes to pizza ovens you need this:
- Portable Pizza Oven – These are specially-designed ovens, perfectly-sized to fit a large pizza, that is fueled by gas to help you achieve the perfect pizza at home.
Hungry Howie’s® Menu
Last, but not least, you’ll need a Hungry Howie’s® menu, and here’s why. Making pizza is not as easy as it looks in the movies. To make pizza at home you need more than just the right tools, you need the passion and talent Hungry Howie’s® pizza makers have. So, when everything goes sideways, you can always count on us to deliver you a freshly-baked, perfectly-cooked, delicious pizza. No dirty dishes or kitchen chaos needed.