The instructions for the pizza said to put it on a baking tray in the oven for ten minutes, at 180°C. Hoping to avoid dirtying the scarily-clean Swiss baking tray I had bought earlier today (because there was no way I was going to dirty the terrifyingly clean tray provided), I put some baking parchment on the baking tray, and put the pizza on the baking parchment, before putting the whole lot into the preheated oven.
There was a funny smell of burning, but I presumed it would pass. As I turned to go back to the sitting room for a few minutes, the smell continued, and intensified. I looked back at the oven, wondering what could be causing the smell… Could there possibly be some (shock, horror!) crumbs, hidden somewhere behind the dazzling clean oven fittings? Orange, I thought. Yellow, I thought. Those don’t belong there… Flames! What on earth?! The oven’s on fire!
Actually, not quite. Just the baking parchment, burnt in a nice pizza-sized circle in the bottom of the baking tray. Stephen put out the flames without destroying my pizza, and we cleaned up the ash. And so we come to “Weird things about Switzerland #203: Baking parchment that goes on fire when you put it in the oven”.
I’m not sure, but I *think* there are two times of baking paper in Switzerland. Between that and the plastic filming stuff that does NOT necessarily go in the microwave (you have to be careful about that too
) (and some other weird stuff) you gotta be extra careful the first months you go to the supermarket :p