The one minute par-bake also makes it so much easier and stress free to slide a fully loaded pizza onto the stone. I don’t even use cornmeal just lightly dusted whole wheat flour for the raw dough. The par-baked crust needs nothing.
We used to cornmeal lightly but then discovered parchment paper. It's super easy to slide off with a spatula underneath.
When you par-bake, how long does it take you to then add the ingredients? Do you have to rush? Or is it better to take a few minutes, so the oven can re-heat itself?
I’ve gotten much better at load the pizza into my pizza oven stress-free. I’ve moved away from cornmeal; it works great, but I never liked the gritty texture it gives the pizza.
My technique is to use a wooden pizza peel and liberally flour it before starting to form the dough-ball into a pie shape. I form the pie using my fists, so I have a chance to shake the extra flour off the crust before I start putting the sauce and toppings on it. I’ll also give the peel a good shake before I start saucing, just to make sure the dough isn’t sticking.
Doing all of the above, I haven’t accidentally turned a pizza into a ripped-up calzone for at least a few years.
One issue with parchment paper is the max temperature rating is 425-450 and I've gotten best pizza crust results with temperature of 500 with my oven and that scorches the none food covered parts of parchment paper when I tried it. I don't know if it's toxic when overheated and burned like that but it is super convenient for lower temperature usages.
At my house we routinely scorch parchment paper (the edges away from food) and use it for all sorts of purposes. It should be perfectly safe because the coating is just silicone. However, white parchment paper has some amount of dioxin in it (I'm not sure how much), which is bad stuff; possibly also fluorine. I've also heard that some parchment may add plastics for extra non-stick, exposing you to PFAs and the like.
Probably a good idea to stick with the hippie-looking brands / made in Western countries like If You Care, which use unbleached paper and silicone and presumably don't douse the paper in other chemicals.
