Some things that may help.... 1. I always "oil" my hands with coconut oil (vegetable oil would also work) when handling dough so I don't have to use any bench flour. I keep a small amount in a tiny bowl so I can reapply if necessary. 2. If oiling you hands doesn't help with handling, you may need to lightly flour your dough AND oil your hands. 3. There are also dough gloves available, but I've never had any experience using them, and I'm not sure if they would help handling the sticky dough. 4. You might have good results forming the dough on parchment paper and transfer the paper AND the dough to your baking stone. 5. You don't say what kind of flour you are using. The higher the protein level the more hydration it will absorb. So if the recipe calls for bread flour and you use all-purpose flour, you would need to reduce the amount of liquid or increase the amount of flour. As you already found out, if you don't like the dough hydration, you should feel free to alter the ratio of ingredients until it's something you like to work with. -Grainlady Here is a link that might be useful: Dough gloves - Williams-Sonoma

Yummy! BBQ chicken pizza is one of our favorites too :-) We also like the crunch of cornmeal on our pizza crusts, but I use polenta on the peel to get that effect. For a while there I was using parchment paper under the crusts and just setting the crusts on the stone paper and all, but we missed the cornmeal flavor and crunch. I have a little whisk broom I use to dust the leftover cornmeal off of the stone so it doesn't burn if I'm baking more than one. I'll be curious to see what your experiment yields - I wouldn't think that replacing that small amount of flour with cornmeal would cause any problems. I have a batch of the dough in the freezer (the first time I've frozen it, as an experiment), and now I'm hungry for pizza so I guess I'll have to take it out and make some this weekend too. Maybe one BBQ chicken and one sausage and mushroom, just because I can LOL. Linda - I'm glad your pizza was a hit! Deniselie - I've never done a kitchen remodel, but we did do some hardwood floors in our last house which necessitated living in the family room with only a microwave and crockpot for a while, so I can only imagine what that must be like. I think I'd be daydreaming about the meals I'd make too... Becky

We have pizza night at least once a month or 6 weeks. I'll prep ingredients maybe Thursday night....enough ingredients for multiple pies while at the task. Always a pizza party the day/night when family descends from all over. Drive/fly arriving at different times...easy to personalize, make your own kids love. Rarely use my pizza stones. I get good results with pans. Start one on the middle rack of a very hot oven, another goes below on the lower rack, then moved up when the first comes out. Repeat. Enjoy one or two and the rest 4-5 we freeze. For lunches or a quick snack. At some point treat yourself to these. 6 for under 20 bucks. Very even cooking with the heat circulating all around but I do have a monster wall oven even if small. 6 pies in under an hour. The last ones for the freezer I take out a few minutes early. No need to thaw...straight from freezer to the oven. (I have the same ones. it came up as a past purchase). Bought June 2018. They still look near new. No dishwasher as aluminum will tarnish. But a soak and mild scrub they clean up great. Slide to a cutting board for cutting/serving. A knife/pizza wheel will cut groves in aluminum as it tends to be soft. My older ones are a bit 'baked on' and trashy having run through the dishwasher but still work fine though too big for this oven. For a party it is nice to have clean ones. No need to fix something that works. No need to thaw frozen dough and start the process the day before and not get around to making a pie. Love to cook and love to pull out something I made from the freezer. I like super thin crust as does most of my friends and family. I use unbaked flour tortillas most often. DH likes to make the dough so we have that also. Not as nice as Ann_t's crust. I don';t need/want all the carb. I get brick oven pizza enough in the city. (some of those are the older 'baked on' pans I can't use now)

Report card on last night's pizza experiment... I adopted and adapted much of the excellent advice from the generous people here, and to my taste, achieved a 90% result! First, turned on the oven to full bore before making the dough. Added around an extra cup of flour to my usual mix. (Who measures?) I think this made a big difference, as the finished pizza had a thicker base with some "chew", not crunch. Just threw the granular yeast into the flour, without proving it first. No oil. Added more water than I normally would. Got it to a consistency where it was sticky, without quite sticking to my fingers. Into a covered bowl. By now, the house was so hot that I went out and sat on the verandah, talking to the kangaroos while the dough was rising. An hour later, I just threw the beautifully risen dough onto the pan without a punch and 2nd kneading. No oil on pan. Spread onto the pan and added toppings. I only added minimal toppings, as in the past I've been guilty of overloading it, requiring longer cooking time. Grated the cheese on the fine side, rather than coarsely. Again, less time to cook. Still using top shelf of oven, put in empty 10" pan first, with 12" pizza directly on top of it. It's some insulation, no? Just 10 minutes later, time to eat, and it was wonderful! Bottom only slightly crisp, but properly cooked. Dough chewy but cooked through. I ate the entire thing in 10 minutes with a glass of nice shiraz, and toasted you all! (Paying for it today, though, as I think the 12 chillies were overkill.) So a big thank you from me to you!