Reply by CaptainSkully

I made a pizza peel for my girlfriend, and she cranks out restaurant-quality pizzas every Sunday night. It’s 3/4” red oak I had laying around, and I’ve used it as a template for others. I need to mineral oil it again, because I didn’t follow the once a day for a week, once a week for a month, once a month for a year regimen. She uses cornmeal, and we make sure the kitchen is well-ventilated, but it’s never ruined a dinner party (the smoke alarm is very festive). It helps a lot if you clean up last week’s cornmeal. We tried parchment paper, but you have to be very careful when you get around 450F. She had a fire, and I reminded her of a Ray Bradbury book she was supposed to read in school. BTW, FYI, and all that, we use unglazed red 6×6 tiles to create a pizza stone matrix in our oven. They are considerably less expensive than a “real” pizza stone, and accomplish the same thing. We leave ours in all the time to stabilize the oven temp. I made the bevel on one side by passing it over the jointer in an arc at a shallow angle, keeping the pivot point (handle) perpendicular to the blade. The tricky part was holding the spring-loaded blade guard back while doing it.

-- You can't control the wind, but you can trim your sails