The Fresh Loaf

A Community of Amateur Bakers and Artisan Bread Enthusiasts.

DIY dough loading peel

gavinc's picture
gavinc

DIY dough loading peel

This is my new DIY loading peel heavily based on albacore’s (Lance) DIY “The Smart Peel” he posted back in 2017.  

Loading Peel For The Domestic Oven | The Fresh Loaf

I dimensioned mine to suit my oven and baking stone.  The dough surface area is 360mm wide x 280mm deep. It is made using 6mm plyboard, 10mm aluminium U channel and 6mm wooden dowel. The baker’s linen was hemmed by my beautiful wife, J.

I used it for the first time today with a single 750-gram sourdough loaf. Worked a treat! I’m looking forward to baking some baguettes, where I will load them collectively into the oven without too much loss of steam and heat. This was easy to build and very cheap. Thank you Lance for the inspiration.

This is the underside.

 

albacore's picture
albacore

Great to see another Smartpeel in existence Gavin! Well done. Mine is still in use for just about every bake and I am still on the original cloth.

I did do a couple of enhancements, which may interest you. One was to change any bolts on the underside to nylon ones to stop any scratching on worktops or dough boards. The other was to make the lower dowel captive at the ends, as I found it had a habit of coming loose - usually at the critical moment of loading!

I screwed thin strips of 3mm ply next to the lower U channels and added short lengths of PTFE/Teflon tubing to the ends of the dowel. I selected the tube diameter to give a tight push fit. For good measure I pinned the tubing with a thin pin made from a drill shank - probably about 1.2mm - fiddly but dooable.

You might not need it for your setup, but just in case...

 

Lance

gavinc's picture
gavinc

Lance, great to hear from you. I've used the Smartpeel twice now with great success. Loading 750-gram loaves were very easy. The test will be when I load three baguettes 360cm each east-west onto the baking stone, which was the driver to build it. Already, I saw the need to install an anti-scratch something on the underside. Your idea of nylon bolts are perfect and I will get some and install them. Thanks again for the ideas and inspiration.

Cheers,

Gavin.

gavinc's picture
gavinc

Here is a post demonstrating loading 3 baguettes using the DIY dough loader.

Demonstration of my DIY dough loader | The Fresh Loaf

 Cheers,

Gavin