Pizza peels: how to choose the blade you launch from

What actually matters

The leading edge, and after that the material. Everything else — handle length, hanging cord, the finish on the blade — is comfort.

A launch peel has one mechanical task: get underneath a soft, topped disc without lifting or dragging it. That is decided by how thin the front edge is. A thin, bevelled edge slides in almost flat and the dough barely knows it happened. A thick edge, which is every improvised cutting board and most decorative wooden paddles, shovels a bank of flour ahead of itself and pushes the dough off centre before it has travelled a centimetre. Metal can be milled thin in a way wood cannot, and that is the whole trade the two materials are making.

The material then decides how long you have. Aluminium is smooth and non-porous, so the moisture that the dough gives off has nowhere to go: it stays as a film at the interface, and within roughly a minute the disc is welded in place. Wood is porous and faintly rough, so it takes a little of that surface water into the grain and presents texture rather than a wet plane. The practical difference is minutes of working time instead of seconds, which is exactly why pizzerias launch from wood and turn with metal.

That difference is a clock, not a defect, and it changes what technique the blade demands. On metal, dust with semolina, top the pizza on the peel rather than moving it there afterwards, and launch promptly. On wood, you can be slower and clumsier and still get away with it — and you give up the thin edge that slips under a set, baked crust for turning.

Size is the last real specification, and bigger is not better. A blade around 35 cm wide takes a 30 cm pizza with room to steer and still angles through a normal oven door; much wider and you are fighting the door frame with a hot pizza on board. Length of handle matters in the same practical way: enough to keep your knuckles out of the oven mouth, short enough to swing in a domestic kitchen.

One thing no peel does is fix a dough that was never going to launch. A slack, over-proofed or badly floured disc will stick to anything, and the tool cannot rescue it.

The picks

Five blades, and the first thing to know is that they are not five answers to one question. If you buy one peel, buy the thin metal one at the top: it launches adequately and it retrieves properly, and no other single blade here does both.

The next two are second blades bought for specific reasons. A perforated blade narrower than the launch peel is the turning peel — the other half of the two-blade system a pizzeria runs, and worth having once you are turning pizzas mid-bake rather than hoping.

A turning blade and a launch blade are judged by opposite standards on the same measurement, which is worth saying plainly because the number on the two listings can look identical: a launch blade wants to be wider than the pizza so there is floured margin to steer by, and a turning blade wants to be narrower than the pizza so it can get under a set base inside the oven. A blade at about 30 cm is a compromise at both jobs — narrower than a dedicated turning peel, which is closer to 20 cm, and tighter than the width this page recommends for launching.

A wooden blade is the other second purchase, and it is the one to add if your doughs are getting wetter or your topping hand is slow: porous grain takes the clock off the launch, at the cost of an edge that will never slide cleanly under a baked crust.

The last two are the top pick in different bodies rather than different arguments. One is stainless with a handle that folds, for a kitchen with nowhere to hang a peel; the other is cut down to about the width of the pizza itself, for an oven mouth that will not take anything larger. Both launch on the same principle and both ask for the same technique — semolina, top the pizza on the blade, launch promptly.