We describe our work on gold surfaces that are made by peeling gold films off various smooth glass substrates. We find that we are able to routinely and reliably produce extremely smooth, large area gold surfaces : typically, for areas less than or equal to 40 mu m square we find the residual roughness of our samples is an order of magnitude less than that of surfaces produced using conventional techniques. While we intend to use these to measure the van der Waals force between alkali atoms and gold surfaces, other potential uses include samples for fundamental surface physics investigations, scanning tunneling microscopy substrates, and reflective optics. We provide details as to how we make these extremely smooth samples and discuss our activities to characterize them.