What do YOU do with Cutter Pans and Pizza Skin Transportation?


Here's a situation that I'm faced with at least a few times a year:  Make the dough for thin pizzas at home.  Do a cold rise overnight, take them out in the am and spread the skins on the pans.  Then, later in the day... pack up my gear, get in the car and head to someone's house (my Mom's, Nat's Mom's, etc).  Where we dress and bake and serve the pies.

With Detroit-style pizzas, that's a breeze.  There are a bunch of vendors who sell plastic lids that snap on to the blue steel pans that I use.  But, what about round cutter pans?  The ones I use are from Lloyd's Pans and have a 63-degree angle with just a shallow lip.  I press the dough into one of these and when it rises, it comes up to almost meet the edge of the dough.   At home, that's fine.  But what about transporting?  These things aren't the easiest to handle and there isn't a lid that I have on hand that works.  I've been recently using these black plastic dimpled serving trays as tops for my cutter pans, but they aren't a good fit, slide all over and don't stack.

But, I recently came across these nesting pan lids from Lloyd's.   They're designed to work with deep dish nesting pans, but what about using them with cutter pans?  From the looks of the photo, these have a few 'lips' built into the top that could serve to nest the cutter pans and allow me to stack them neatly - both at home but also when we go on the road.  One thing I've learned is that when it comes to cutter pans, I've recently begun to transition away from the bigger ones down to 12" pans.  I seem to be able to get a better product out of the smaller pans with a more consistent crisp on the undercarriage.  On the big 16" ones, the middle tends to stay soggy.

As I transition to buying more of the pans in the smaller size, I'm thinking I might begin to pair them with a few of these stacking lids.  What do you other pizza nerds do?  Don't tell me that you keep your dough in ball form until you arrive?  That's one way, but I much prefer to allow my dough to proof in the pans and build up a little bit of 'skin' on top.

These lids might hold the answer.

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