Your Guide to Your Guide: The Pizza Oven Backstop

Making a pizza usually isn’t compared to piloting a jet fighter, but go with me here. Just like pilots rely on an “aircraft marshaller” to guide them while landing (you know, the guy waving a glow stick in each hand), pizza-makers sometimes need a little guidance when sliding their pizza onto a hot stone. Finding the exact right place to shake your pizza off the peel can be tricky: do it too far back, and you’ll find your pizza sliding off the stone and into the gap between the stone and the back of the oven. Enter our Pizza Oven Backstop!

This deceptively simple portable pizza oven accessory helps you land your pizza perfectly. It’s a metal mesh fence that installs at the back of your oven, anchored between your two pizza stones. It acts as a guide for your pizza peel while also keeping your pizza from sliding off the back of the stone. Its open mesh design ensures that heat can get through to your pizza, giving you the crispy finish you’ve come to love from your Pizzeria Pronto or PizzaQue.

Pizza Oven Backstop Installation

• First remove the backstop from envelope, unfold and flatten.
• Once flattened, bend the tabs 90º so that they are facing the same direction. (Your backstop will have an L-shape when viewed from the side.)
• Remove your oven's hood and top stone.
• Place the backstop's tabs on top of the bottom stone. Bend the backstop so it is flush with the curved edge of the stone and sits inside the stone brackets.
• Replace the top stone, sandwiching the backstop's tabs in between the two stones.
• Replace the hood, and you're ready to cook!

To use your oven with the backstop, insert your uncooked pizza into your preheated oven using a pizza peel as usual. You might feel your pizza peel make contact with the backstop; this tells you your peel is too far back into the oven. Pull your peel back a few inches, and with a quick forward-then-backward motion, slide your pizza from the peel and onto the stone. Slowly and gently slide your peel out from underneath the pizza, leaving the pizza on the stone. (And if you need tips on using a pizza peel, check out our video! Nick shows you the correct technique for sliding a pizza off of a peel.) With the Pizza Oven Backstop, using your portable pizza oven is even easier than before. Help your pizza avoid the "danger zone” (sorry, Kenny Loggins), and watch your pizza night take off!