Peelology 101, Introduction to Peelology
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Getting Dough Into the Oven Safely
In this page, you'll learn how to get fully risen bread dough into your oven, safely. The easiest case is when you are making pan bread. Just put the pan in the oven. *doh* as my son and Homer Simpson might say.
But breads that have risen in bread forms are tougher. How do you get the bread out safely? The answer is, be gentle. We'll start using a plain peel, which you can get from cooking supply stores near you, and then move on to using a SuperPeel.
Start by removing the cling wrap from the top of the dough, then cover your dough with a piece of bakers parchment paper, and then cover the parchment paper with a peel. Some people use reusable parchment, which works out very well. To our great sorrow, uur usual vendor is no longer in business, however, Amazon carries a similar product, which we have not tried.
Then flip the whole sandwich over, remove the banneton, and slash the dough, if desired. Many people dust the peel with corn meal, semolina or rice flour to act as a lubricant, and then they just drop the dough onto the peel. This has two little problems. All too often an over-risen dough will collapse when dropped into a peel from any height. Next, the corn meal, semolina or rice flour tend to stink up the kitchen as they burn. The bakers parchment paper will not burn, although it will scorch after two or three uses. (Reusable parchment can be reused hundreds of times.)
Next, transfer the peel to the oven, positioned where you want the bread to be, and then jerk out the peel, leaving the bread in that place on the tiles.
All this sounds a bit complex, but like riding a bicycle it is easier to do than to describe.
Perhaps the movie, below, will make it clearer. A quick note about the movie - the sound track isn't quite clear at one spot. In it I say, "And then you flip the whole SANDWICH over" shortly after the movie starts.

The basics of using the SuperPeel are about the same as using a regular peel, only you don't need to use bakers parchment paper, corn meal, or other stuff. Start by uncovering the dough, then put the SuperPeel on top of the dough.
Next, flip the sandwich of SuperPeel, dough and banneton over. Then lift off the basket.
You may score the dough if you want. If the dough collapses when you slash it, that means you either weren't meant to slash this batch of bread, or you need to work on your slashing technique. Next, transfer the SuperPeel to the oven, put the dough above the spot where you want it to be, hold the grip, and slide the peel backwards.
Below is a link to a video hosted at YouTube that shows the process from start to finish. It seems I forgot to oil the plastic wrap that day, so the dough collapsed a bit as I removed the plastic wrap. If it was easy to do, everyone and their brother would upload poorly edited videos to YouTube. Oh, wait! It is and they do!
