Care, Prep & Cooking Instructions:

Dough Care:

• Once home best to put in a zip lock bag and refrigerate until used
• If dough ball dries or crusts over due to air exposure, apply water and seal in bag to soften.

Pre Cook Prep and Consideration:

How we going to heat this culinary delight you’re whipping up? You have to remember that your oven isn’t quite set up like ours over here at Fat Boys. Although we can set them to the same temperature the ovens are not the same. The Fat Boys oven applies heat (like a blow dryer) to the pizza allowing it to cook quicker whereas your conventional oven is just a heated box. The conventional oven tends to burn the outside while our hungry bellies wait for the inside to cook properly on a standard cookie sheet or tin.

If you are a pizza aficionado, connoisseur or do this on a regular basis I would suggest the following cooking tips:

• Buy a cooking stone that can easily withstand 400-500 degrees. Caution some retail stones are prone to thermal shock and crack at higher sustained temps. Check yours or product specs before you purchase.
• Select, purchase, and season a pizza screen that will fit on your cooking stone.

Pizza Assembly and Cooking:

• Pre heat oven AND pizza stone to 450-500 degrees. You want a hot stone so that your pizza screen and pizza draw heat helping to cook the middle of the pizza.*
• Stretch the crust out, pushing out air bubbles that may grow in the oven
• Place your dough on the pizza screen. DO NOT PUSH THE DOUGH ON THE SCREEN OR IT WILL COOK INTO THE SCREEN
• Apply your pizza sauce and then the cheese of your choice
• Apply toppings making sure toppings are evenly distributed and not piled
• Place completed pizza (which is on the screen) in the oven on the heated stone.
• Keep an eye on the pie. Pizza should slide off the screen. Cut and eat!!

A few extra slices:

• For flavor cut your toppings smaller
• Like reaallly thin crust? Remember if your crust is too thin, your slices will not be able to support the weight of the toppings, leaving your toppings in the middle of the plate.
• Using veggies, pineapple, and some hams with high water content will affect cook times, sometimes leading to a soggy pie.
• Using low moisture cheeses will help the cooking process

*If you are using your stone multiple times or continuously, your stone will actually “cool” making for longer cook times. To correct this allow your stone to heat up in between pizzas. This is one of the reasons conveyor ovens have replaced “brick and slate ovens” in pizza stores. The volume required for service in today’s pizza store has made conveyor ovens a necessity. You find brick ovens mostly in sit down eateries with menus offering more than pizza and a longer wait for that pizza while nursing your $6 cocktail!! Many claim “brick ovens cook best” but most data shows that folks cannot tell the difference. But it is true that most iconic, old school, established, mom and pop pizza places happen to have brick or slate ovens, but there are a variety of reasons that the pizza is good, not just the ovens. In fact my hometown “knock your socks off” pizza place had brick ovens and after 30 years of going there I found out they also had a set of conveyor ovens in the back!!! The front oven was just to warm up slices!!! Who knew?