I am watching an episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy tries to make pizza by throwing the dough up in the air and spinning it around. Do pizza places still do that anywhere? I mostly see it rolled out or pressed out.
It’s called Pizza Spinning, and it certainly is practiced. It was apparently used to lure people in to the pizzeria. It’s still used for that purpose – both in life and in countless TV advertisements (which you evidently haven’t seen).
There’s even a competition:
http://munchies.vice.com/articles/neapolitan-pizza-chefs-think-pizza-spinning-is-tackyI saw on one of those shows like American Eats where they interviewed the current owner of the ‘first’ pizza place in New York and he said that, although they can and have done it, they don’t like to do it because it ruins the dough. He didn’t explain how it ruins it though.
Overworking dough can make the resulting bread very tough and for NY style pizza, you want a light, flat, foldable crust.
Finally a question in GQ I can answer…
The long and short of it is YES, some pizza makers prefer to “spin” their pies. I can, but I choose not to for a variety of reasons:
- (most important) I don’t “spin” very good. I have two Pizzamakers that work for me that can and do spin a “slice” pie to about 24".
- Those who spin have a tendency to not pound the bubbles out. Our dough, at peak, spends 72 +/- hour in a slow fermentation. Pounding out your pie dough insures an even, stable crust. Bubbly pies may be the rage today but a NY Slice needs the body and structure to hold up to folding.
- Working the dough on a table (by hand) allows the pizza maker to compensate for any dough anomalies.
My cite is that I run a NY style slice and pie shop.
If you order pizza from a chain, certainly nobody’s doing that. It’s a silly little showmanship thing - there’s not any practical purpose to it.
Well, there is an argument for it. I can’t spin to save my life, so I just hand stretch my dough (rolling out or sheeting dough is a different beast and leads to a different crust and pizza, and I usually use a different recipe for dough that I want to make that way. I wouldn’t do it for a New York or Italian style pie, for instance, but I would for a Midwestern thin crust.)
In the Eighties, Pizza Hut found out through a survey that what customers really wanted was hand-tossed pizza. So the Hut “cooks” were taught to run it through the wringer as usual, and then use two hands to toss it about three inches in the air, over the baking tray. Voila, hand tossed.
Met Husband #2 at his pizza place. He used to do a slight toss a couple of times towards the end. Stretched out the dough a little bit so you wouldn’t have to handle it as much.
My parents bought the pizza place from him. Brother used to spin a pizza dough in each hand, but he was a show off. When my dad would make the pizza, he never threw it, he rolled it out like a tortilla, because hey, we’re Mexican!
When I worked as a Dominos manager (over 20 years ago) I used to do the toss as a way to make sure the pizza was the right size for the screen it was cooked on. I’d only give it one toss after slapping out the dough, and it seemed to work well. No problems with bubbles.
Ditto. If there were kids in the carryout area, I’d “miss” and have it going flying over the sneeze guard, to the squeals of all. Worth the 35 cents a ball of dough ran back then.