The Problem

As almost any baker will attest, one of their most routine and challenging baking tasks is transferring a masterpiece of raw, sticky, crumbly, or otherwise delicate dough from one place to another. Whether moving a simple pizza or a sticky freeform ciabatta loaf to your hot oven stone, or a delicate sheet of rolled pastry dough to a pie plate, the task can be trying at best, and is often a flirtation with disaster!

In their attempt to solve this problem, most home bakers traditionally use lots of extra flour when rolling out and transferring their dough to keep it from sticking, and to help it slide around. Unfortunately, this solution often creates other problems. The more flour incorporated into the dough, the more its consistency is altered. The result is often a poor quality finished product. And, even with all that extra messy flour, the task is still often imprecise and unpredictable.

Until now, it’s just been “Tough Cookies”!

Pizza and bread bakers use lots of cornmeal under the dough, which acts like little “ball bearings” to help slide breads and pizzas onto a hot oven stone. Pizzas can still stick, or land in the wrong place. Breads can still deflate, and all that cornmeal can burn and smoke. All of this can create an nasty and unnecessary mess in your oven.