marc:the wood whisperer is sponsored by powermatic. the gold standard since 1921, and by clear vue cyclones. clear the air and breathe easy. on today's show we're gonna make this giant ping-pong paddle. actually it's a pizza peel and i'm gonna show you how to make one.
(lively music) one of my absolute favoritefoods in this world is pizza, and we cook a lot of it atthe wood whisperer house so i thought it would be fun to make our very own pizza peel. now a pizza peel is really nothing more than a giant spatula. you could buy this.
they're certainly commercially available. you could buy them withvarious length handles but i think for the house i think all i really needis a fairly short handle and just a nice wide platform that we could put the raw pizza on and use that to deliverthe pizza to the stone, and then of course pickit up from the hot oven and bring it out when it's done.
you could see fairly simple construction. we'll get into all the details but make sure you stick around to the end of this episode because nicole is gonna come in and she's gonna show us how she makes our tomato pie, and that's the northeast version of pizza. it's actually the best pizza
in case you didn't know. all right, so let's get into the materials you're gonna need to make this project. all stock should bemilled to 1/2 inch thick. the middle piece is 2 1/2 inches wide by 26 inches long. the next two pieces are 3 1/4 inches wide by 17 1/2 inches long. the outer most stripsare 3 1/2 inches wide
the additional handlematerial is 2 1/2 inches wide by 10 inches long. (lively accordion music) you can use just aboutany wood species you want for your pizza peel. now i'm using bubinga and figured maple. it's not because i want to be wasteful. in fact, quite the opposite. these are off cuts andshorts from other projects
that were just too short, too narrow, to thin to be used in other projects. the thing is boards like this will sit in my scrap bin for years until i come up witha way to utilize them. even though something like this it may extravagant to use this high quality wood for a pizza peel, in fact, what i've doneis come up with a project
that utilizes wood thatwould just be sitting there and it would go to waste otherwise. you can use anything you want. the key is to have fun with the pattern. mine is just a simple two-toned pattern, it's not too busy but you could definitely cut this up into smaller strips and put that together, or you can use one wood through out
and just give it sort of this single large board look to it. whatever you want to doit's your pizza peel. once you have all of your wood milled down and selected. you can glue it up, we'll get to that. we do need to glue this all together but i want to talk about the shape that we're gonna choose
and the fact that weneed to make a template. let's take a look atwhat i've come up with. i'm making my template out of1/2 inch baltic birch stock and i like to draw the shape right on the template stock itself so we can cut it out and just use it right in the project. i've also added a pieceof extra material here for the handle which we can remove later.
it's just out of convenience because this is the piecethat i had available. what i've got here is a square basically. it's 16 inches wide by 17 1/2 inches long. what you do within thatsquare is completely up to you but a couple things to keep in mind. number one, you do want to remove stock because you're gonna have a circular pizza here most times
so a lot of the stuff in thecorners is extra material and for a short handledpizza peel like this the more weight that'sin this flat section the harder it's gonna be on your wrists. we can lighten the load a little bit by removing some of that extra stock that just doesn't need to be there. then of course, it justmakes it look good, right? you want to make sureyou incorporate curves
and shapes that make itlook good to your eye, but honestly whateveryou do within this square is completely up to you. whatever you think looks good. let me show you a couple of details here. where the handle meetsthe main body of the peel we've got an overlap. my bubinga piece is gonna over the maple and it has just a nice little curve
and we might even route a little profile in the front there. you'll also notice thatthe curve on the back end is continuous through thehandle and into the board which is pretty cool. that's a nice effect as it transitions from one to the other even though these aremade of multiple pieces having a curve that goes through
all of those pieces at once sort of gives you theillusion of it still being one solid piece of material. instead of keeping thesides perfectly straight, i decided to put in a littlebit of a curvature there. not much but i think again, just removing some extra material is good and it softens theoverall look of the piece. if you look closely you might see
the secondary line here at the front. this extra curve. that actually represents a bevel that we're gonna put in the front. that should make iteasier to pick things up and slide them off of the pizza peel. in case you're wondering here are just some of the tools i use to make curves like this.
i've got a nice assortmentof french curves that i ordered off ofamazon.com, pretty cheap. then i've got thiswhich is not super cheap but i think worth the investment and that is a lee valley drawing bow. this guy you could put justabout any curve you want and the strap holds it in place. this thing has been oneof the most used tools in my collection when itcomes to making curves.
let's head to the bandsaw now and we could start cuttingthis thing to shape. i tried to cut as closeto the line as i can without going too far. using a rasp i finessed the curve so it's smooth and continuous. (scraping) you can use an oscillating spindle sander for this as well if you have one.
the final smoothing is done with a flexible sanding strip. now with the template cut and shaped we could turn outattention to the glue up. now of course all theseedges need to be jointed because we're gonna glue them together and we don't want thatglue seam to be visible. now in particular, figured maple even on a good sharp joint
you can have issues with that edge because the grain isundulating up and down. a lot of times you do windup with this washboard type edge there that prevents you from getting the tightest possiblejoint that you could have. what i like to do especiallyon figured maple like this is to put this up in the workbench and actually use a hand plane
to just through up that edge and just sweeten it up a little bit. let's go ahead and do that. what i'm gonna use for this is my new jack plane. i just picked this upa couple of weeks ago and i'm having a lot of fun with it. it's a bevel up version and the bevel is set at 50 degrees.
that higher bevel angle is gonna make it easier for me to plane over this really tricky surface. a surface like thiswith this kind of figure is always gonna be alittle bit tricky to plane but the higher angle makesit a little bit easier. i don't want to take more than maybe one or two passes here. see that first pass is gettingall of those high spots,
cleaning it up. a little bit better. now we're starting to get a shaving. all right. doesn't need to be dead on perfect. it's not a show surface but i just want to make sureit's cleaner than it was. that is a nice joint. i spread a liberal amount of glue
on one edge of each board. with the pieces flat i can rub the joints back and forth to help transfer the glueto the opposing edges. i use a piece of scrap to help keep the boards flat and even while tightening up the clamps. one thing you want to be reallycareful of with this glue up is that the panel doesn'tstart to bow on you.
what can happen a lot of times with a thinner panel like this especially if you have all your clamps oriented the same way you could apply pressure and actually induce that bow. one thing i did off camera was i flipped around the two middle clamps so they're actually facing the other way
and that helps to provide some potentially opposing pressure to the other two clamps. additionally i grabbed acouple of f-style clamps and just held the entirething nice and flat to the outside bars because i now my bars are flat, right? if i'm nice an flat referenced up against that bar then i know that the panel itself is flat.
that should at least stackthe cards in our favor for a pretty flat glue upwhen it's all said and done. while that's drying in the clamps we haven't glued on the handle piece and that's intentional because we need to do alittle bit of shaping first and we won't glue this on until this panel is nice and cleaned up after the glue up.
we can actually add a nice little curve to the top here. using an mdf circle template i trace on a nice curve. since there isn't much stock to remove i use the vertical beltsander to shape the curve. the top side of the curve receives a nice decorativeround over on the end and about one inch back on each side.
now the panel is dry out of the clamps and at this point wecould level the surface. of course, as hard asyou try to get everything nice and perfectly aligned it almost never is. you do need to smooth things out. this will remove any glue and it will get the surface nice and flat. i'm gonna use my number 80 cabinet scraper
to do the work. now while i'm at it i'm gonna give the surface a nice light sanding because when i glue on that handle strip i'm not gonna be able tosand in this area again so it's a good idea just to give the whole thinga decent rough sanding. (machine buzzing)
now i'm gonna use the template to trace the shape unto the blank and then we'll be ableto rough cut it out. just want to make surei've got enough material on all three sides here. then down at the bottom by the handle we're just looking to make sure we're pretty much inalignment with the bottom edge and that nothing is overhanging the blank.
it looks pretty good to me and then i could takemy little handle piece and kind of just pretendit's attached like that. that looks pretty good. now it's off to the bandsaw. i like to cut about1/16 away from the line keeping the work piecejust a bit over sized. now we can double sticktape the template down including this guy as well
and head over to the router table and use the flush trim bit to bring everything to its final shape. the double stick tapeis pressure sensitive so once i have it in position i put my weight on itto secure it into place. at the router table i usea spiral flush trim bit to bring the peel to its final shape, a perfect copy of the template.
the double stick tape is very strong and usually requires thehelp of a putty knife to loosen things up. now i want to glue the handle in place but before i do i'd really like to get thatcurve pre cut into there and then i could flush trim the handle after its glued up to match the existing profile
that's now in this piece. i'm gonna use this guyto trace the shape on. now i could just cut this at the bandsaw. i was careful to cut outside my lines just so that i have someoverhanging material and this we could flushtrim at the router table or with a handheld router later on. heck, we could evenflush it up with a rasp if we really wanted to.
now i need to glue thistop piece onto the maple. we're just gonna spreada little glue here. i'm just gonna use some quick clamps to hold everything in place for now. now i can add some good clamping pressure. okay, i'll just let that dry. now i'm just gonna flush trim the handle to get rid of the extra bubinga stock and of course i have tohold this piece upside down
which is not really all that stable but it's such a small piece. if i put downward pressure here this is fairly lightweight, i should be able to very easily just trim it to shape. you could certainly add some extra support if you wanted to but in this particular case
i don't think this is too big of a deal. now even with the router bit here i've got a transition of twocurves meeting one another. that's a little bit roughfor the bit to get everything and get the nice transitionthat i'm looking for. i still have a little bitof bubinga that's high here. i want to remove that and i think the easiest wayto do it is with a scraper. now the handle is gonna get a nice 5/16
of an inch round over on both the top and bottomand the back on both sides and this is gonna makeit a lot more comfortable to grip in hand. now for the rest of the round overs like this back area here and the sides it's gonna be kind of tight quarters and i really don't wantto try and figure out how to do this at the router table
so i'll go on handheld at this point using an eighth inch radius round over bit and really only focusingon the sides and the back. the front i've got some plans for. we'll do that next but let's go ahead andmake that round over. where the handle meetsthis part of the peel we actually have a transition from a bigger radius to a smaller radius
so there's a little bit of a hump there. that's something we justkind of blend together with a rasp. the final detail is onethat's purely functional although it will look pretty cool is creating bevels at the front here. by thinning out thefront of the pizza peel it's gonna make it easierto slide underneath a cooked pizza
and also make it easierto slide a raw pizza off. we need to not only createa bevel on the top edge but a smaller bevelhere on the bottom edge and that's gonna allow it to work better when we tilt it up on an angle and it's touching a flat surface. this one on the top isgonna be more substantial and i have it tapering off. i don't want to match theradius of this outside curve.
it's tapering a little bit so it's actually a larger radius and i'm just doing that for looks really. i'm going back 3/4 of an inch from the front center point and then 3/8 of an inch at the sides and you could see i'vegot my drawing bow set up to give me a line there as a guiding line. i'm going a quarter inchdeep all the way across
so i use my adjustable square and gave myself a guideline there as well. now all i need to do is use a rasp to bringeverything back to my lines. as you could see between those two bevels when you go at a slight angle like this you could really get the tip of this board right underneath anythingthat you need to pick up. that's really what we're shooting for.
now it's just a matter ofsanding everything down to 220 grit. (buzzing) now i'm gonna apply thefinish to the pizza peel and i'm gonna use tried& true oil varnish blend. this is a polymerizedlinseed oil varnish mixture. there's no petroleum distillates in it. it's non-toxic. it's actually really goodfor food items like this
and it applies very much like a pure oil. just dip my rag in and rub it into thesurface very, very thinly. we really want to wipe it in. we don't want to leavea whole lot of excess. just gonna work it into the grain and just make sure all that's left is a very, very thin coat. now once it's fairly well-coated
i'm gonna get a drier part of my rag here and just go over the whole surface and wipe down any standing oil. the appearance of the surfaceshould be dull at this point. i'm gonna apply finish to the other side. i'm just gonna flip it back over and let it dry on some painter's pyramids. i'll give the top one final wipe down and this will be the wayi'll let it dry overnight
with the show surface,the top surface facing up. just in case thoselittle pyramids decide to do anything to the surface below. don't forget with oily rags you always want to spreadthem out into a single layer and lay them on a non flammable surface. if you just bunch them up and throw them in the garbage can you could very well havea fire on your hands.
i like to spread mine into a single layer and i just lay that on the concrete floor. the next day once it's dry and crispy then i can take it and throwit in the regular trash. now over the course ofabout three to four days i applied a total of four coats of this tried & true varnish oil. what it leaves me with is a nice, smooth silky finish witha very satiny look to it.
at this point, we can go back and either with steel wool or high grade abrasive pad or just an old sock, justmake sure it's a clean sock i'm gonna wipe the surface down. really i'm trying to wipepretty aggressively here and i want to build up some heat and that's gonna burnish the surface and just give you a niceconsistent look and feel
across the entire thing. ultimately this tried & true varnish oil is really it's acting more like an oil. if you're familiar with the differences between varnishes and oil don't expect this thing to work or look like a polyurethane, it doesn't. it takes long to dry. everything about it says pure oil
so keep that in mind with the application and what you expect from it. a high use item like this, one that's gonna get beatup like a cutting board or even a workbench, those are things that youdon't really want to coat with a thick film finishlike a polyurethane because we know they're gonna get the crap beat of them, right?
we really need to thinkabout repair ability and polyurethanes aren'tthe easiest to repair. that's why typically for cutting boards, pizza peels, workbenches we tend to use finishes like oils because they're a lighter duty finish that does offer some protection but the most important thing it offers is the ability to be repaired very easily
if there's a big scratch or a gouge we can just kind of clean one area, sand it nice and smooth and re-apply more oil and you'll never know thatthat flaw was there before. all right, so we focus on repair ability instead of initial durability if you want to look at it that way. all right, so the only thingleft to do at this point
is to take this bad boy inside and use it. let's make some tomato pie. welcome everyone to thewood whisperer kitchen. this is ... nicole:this is. marc:this is my lovely wife nicole. nicole:hey! marc:she is here to show us how she makes her jersey style
nicole:yes. marc:now tomato pie.nicole: yes. marc:you probably don't know what it is and it is not a pie full of tomatoes. it's pizza. nicole:that's what i thought it was.marc: yeah. it's a very thin crust pizza and it's something that isvery isolated to the northeast new york, philly, new jersey
and specifically one ofwhat i would consider the capitals of tomatopie is trenton, new jersey and that's where i grew up and i ate the stuff likeit was going out of style. marc:that's why i have thislovely fit and trim figure. the thing is since i left new jersey i've been on this quest to find any pizza that comes even close to being as good as this stuff is
and it's just not around nicole:we live on the west coast marc:yes, we do. nicole has been kind enough to try to well, she indulges my needs here. nicole:i enjoy baking so i kind of took itas a personal challenge to try to get as close to his remembered recipe as possible.
marc:i don't even know the recipe so over the years she's asemi-homemade type person so we use a lot ofcanned goods when we can just because it's convenient. nicole:who makes their own ... i'm sure there are people out there marc:absolutely. nicole:i don't have time for that. marc:pizzerias most of the time
nicole:exactly. marc:she has been on a mission to do the best she can and this is kind ofwhat we've come up with. we're still improving it until we can get as we go but ultimately this is a damn good pizza, a damn good tomato pie and it's homemade, and we're gonna be using the pizza peel
i thought it was just a great excuse to show our little recipe here. nicole:this will beour second recipe show. marc:yeah, we did the frenchtoast a long time ago. nicole:a long, long time ago.marc: crunchy french toast. that is on the websitestill if you want to see it. all right, so before youshow me the hardware here nicole:yes.marc: that we're gonna need to make this. i think i need a wardrobe change.
nicole:you do? marc:ha ha! (laughing) don't be intimidated. nicole:no i'm not. marc:i know i look like a professional, just do your thing. nicole:you look like something. marc:i will not unfairly ...
how dare you? i will not unfairly judge your work but please by all means show us what hardware we need to make this glorious, juicy, crispy tomato-laden, cheese-filled delicious nicole:yes, chef priority.marc: thing. chef boy marcy. nicole:(chuckling) chef boy marcy.
marc:all right, show us.nicole: all right. really all you need to do to get started with this recipe. you need a blender of some sort. marc:a blender.nicole: a blender. a bowl. marc:a bowl.nicole: preferably one that you can put warm water in and put in a warmer place.
like my oven does proofing this is what's going toallow our dough to rise because we are gonna make our own dough. and a pizza stone or pizza pan. we're gonna use a stone. marc:pizza stone. nicole:pizza stone. marc:this one actually hasa protective coating on it. a lot of pizza stones don't
and this helps the pizza slide on off and stops things from sticking to it nicole:then of course our beautiful-marc: pizza peel baby! nicole:pizza peel. marc:yeah. i can't wait to makething not look so good. nicole:pretty much it. marc:okay.nicole: that's it. marc:let's get started.nicole: all right, let's go.
marc:empty a single packet of dry yeast into a warm mixing bowl. add one cup of warm water and a pinch of sugar. stir with the fork to break up the clumps and then let the mixturestand for five to 10 minutes while you do somethingfun and interesting. (crickets) add one teaspoon ofsalt and a cup of flour.
with a wooden spoonbegin mixing the flour in and breaking up the clumps. add in a second cup of flour and continue mixing until the dough begins pulling away cleanly from the sides of the bowl. dump the dough out untoa flour coated surface and begin kneading foreight to 10 minutes. form the dough into a nice ball
and lightly coat the ball with some oil. place the dough ball into the oiled bowl and cover it with a warm damp cloth. let it stand in a warm place or use your oven if youhave a proofing option. the dough will usually double in volume in 30 to 50 minutes depending on the type of yeast you used and your specific conditions.
while we're waiting for the dough we can prepare the rest of the ingredients starting with the cheese. cut some mozzarella cheese into chunks on your fancy end grain cutting board or you could just grate it if you prefer. (slapping) to make the sauce we'll need two cans of diced tomatoes
and some garlic. drain the tomatoes being very careful not to spill the liquidonto the counter top. dump both cans into a blender then do your best toopen the garlic bottle or you could use fresh garlic like a real italian would. as you can see nicolerefuses to be rescued. my kind of woman.
blend the tomatoes andgarlic with a few pulses but not too much. we want this sauce to be chunky. now back to the dough. once you can poke thedough with your fingers and it holds the impression it's ready. now we can set the oven to 475 degrees and put a little oil on the stone. the stone then goes intothe oven to preheat.
punch the dough torelieve your frustrations and also get the air out and dump out onto some flour. knead the dough for one to two minutes and then cut it into two halves for two medium pizzas. begin spreading one of the balls out into a thing layer using a rolling pin or do your best pizza guy impression.
spread some corn mill on the pizza peel to prevent the dough from sticking. this is essential forsuch a thin crust pizza. at this point our sonmateo needed his mommy so i stepped in to transferthe dough to the peel. work quickly as you add the cheese first and then the sauce. this is one of the thingsthat defines a tomato pie. as you can see tomatopie is a minimalist dish.
simple ingredients, simple sauce and pure flavor. you could top the piewith whatever you want. today we're having some mushrooms. i'm about paranoid about sticking so i throw in a little extra corn mill. the moment of truth. carefully slide the pie unto the hot stone and bake for 15 to 20 minutes
or until the crust isbrown to your liking. use the peel to pick up the pie and then cut it into slices. star trek pizza cutter is optional. now we eat. so good. now to clean the peel use a damp paper towel to remove any dough or cheese
and then wipe away the water with a dry paper towel. that's it my friends. thanks for watching.