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My recent pizza articles generated mail from readers with questions about the mechanics of pizza-making. (Most of the following tips and tools apply to bread-making too.)

There are deep pizza-industry secrets employed by successful pizzarias across the planet. I won’t share those with you because they’re all about cutting costs, e.g. reusing yesterday’s leftover cheese. You can make better pizza in your own kitchen.

First you’ll need a great dough recipe. Pizza toppings are important, but if the crust is below par, the best toppings in the world won’t rescue your finished pie from mediocrity.

The best pizza-dough recipe I’ve ever made is Peter Reinhart’s delayed-fermentation recipe, which appears in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. I’ve used that recipe since the book came out, and it has never let me down. As an alternative, you can use any dough recipe that calls for nothing more than flour, water, yeast, salt, and (optionally) olive oil, but I’d recommend you cut the specificed yeast amount in half, double the rise time, and make the dough the day before (leaving it to spend the night in the refrigerator).

To make Reinhart’s dough recipe, you won’t need to knead, but you will need a mixer. I use and recommend a 325-watt, 5-quart KitchenAid “Artisan Series” mixer. KitchenAid makes smaller models but they’re not suited to bread-making; in fact this model is actually a bit undersized if you plan to entertain. At a recent pizza dinner for six, I made two batches of dough; given a bigger mixer I could have simply doubled the recipe and saved half the time.

The mixer I lust for is the 525-watt, 6-quart KitchenAid “Professional Series” model. It’s big enough to handle about 90% of my needs in a single batch.

Quick mixer-mishap story: I found the limits of my mixer when making a batch of focaccia. The dough was a bit too stiff. The resistance against the dough hook must have been huge, for the torque ripped the welded metal tab off the side of the mixing bowl. I had to take the bowl to a local machine shop to have the tab welded back on.

Now that you have dough, you’ll need to bake it. There are three essential tools for this stage.

The first is inexpensive but no less critical for its low cost: kitchen parchment. I build pizzas directly on (unbleached) parchment paper. The paper makes it easy to transfer pizzas into the oven, because it’s easy to lift an edge and slide the raw pizza onto a peel or sheetpan. Parchment paper is coated with silicon, which will release the dough after reaching a certain temperature.

I use parchment for bread-baking, too; in fact I wouldn’t want to bake bread or pizza without it. The only alternative I know is to use mounds of semolina or cornmeal, which like tiny ball-bearings can prevent dough from sticking to whatever surface you want it not to stick to. But this makes a mess on the floor and in the oven. Parchment is superior.

Moving one step closer to the oven, you’ll need a pizza peel. If you have a sheetpan with no edges, you can use it instead, but you’ll find the peel easier because of the handle.

Finally, inside the oven you’ll need a pizza stone. I use and recommend Old Stone Oven brand because the stones are thicker than others. Thicker stones retain more heat, which is entirely the point of using stones at all. Old Stone makes a 16-inch round pizza stone and a rectangular 14x16 inch stone. The rectangular is great for baking multiple loaves of bread at once. Either shape is suitable for pizza.

The last essential tool for successful pizza making: a suitable cutter. Cook’s Illustrated recently conducted a 5-way test and concluded (as I recall) that big wheels and handles are the two critical elements to a useful cutter. Amazon offers a wide selection of pizza cutters.

Conspicuously absent: I don’t recommend any sort of pan because I don’t use them. Bake the pizzas directly on the stone (using parchment to ease handling).

Then, when the pizza comes out of the oven, set it on a wire rack for a minute or two. This helps prevent the crust from becoming soggy. I use and recommend Calphalon nonstick cooling racks because they’re sturdy, they’re large enough for a 12''-13'' pizza, and they don’t have clumsy collapsible legs that require two hands to operate.