Okay, when I was a kid, there was one local pizza place that we all ate at, and their thin crust was different than I’ve had anywhere else. It’s kind of hard for me to describe. In many ways, it was a lot like a biscuit that came out of a can, with layers, and not a large mass of dough like a home made buscuit or a regular pizza crust would be. Think of something like a saltine cracker, but bigger in all dimensions. Papa John’s thin crust comes close to the flavor, but isn’t close when it comes to the thickness and layer aspects. Given that the place is some 450 miles away from me (and has since changed their recipe to a nasty one), I can’t exactly pop off and grab one, if I have a craving for it. Any ideas on how it was made?
Yeah, you’ll need a pizza pan with holes in it. Kind of like a “swiss cheese” pizza pan if you will.
Take your dough, roll it out as thin as you like. Toss it in the pan. Then you need this device; it’s like a roller only except it’s about two inches wide and it has spikes on it. With that, you roll it over your dough (as it sits in the pan) several times creating small holes in your pie crust.
Then you just throw the rest of whatever you happen to like on top of your pizza then throw it in the oven.
Basically, the secret is with the pizza pan and the spiked roller.
I’m not to sure how easy it would be to find one of those rollers though.
Ah, heres one. (Third picture down.)
Does anyone know about spinning piza crusts. That is the way you see some piza chefs spinning the crust on their fingers to make it thin and circular.
Does it really improve the piza over simply rolling the crust? And how easy is it to learn to do?
My technique right now is to just put the dough ball on the counter, flatten it, then start stretching it with my hands.
When it gets to the point where it’s not stretching well, and I’m almost tearing it, I roll it out with a rolling pin.
(I’m getting to your answer)
Some people seem to consider this sacriledge and supposedly it has some negative effects on the pizza, but I’m very happy with my pizza crust. It gets crusty on the bottom, soft, and sometimes gets those big bubbles that make a pizza look authentic.
THAT SAID. . .
Sometimes I have gone through the effort to just do the dough by hand. THis involves stretching on the counter, flopping it back and forth from hand to hand, stretching it in the air, and tossing it with a spin, and catching it on the top of my fist, then using the top of both fists to spin it.
Problems:
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More work
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Less even distribution of dough (thinner in the middle, thicker on the outside)
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Overall thicker than I get it with the rolling pin, which means that it might be burnt by the time it cooks through.
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Even if you get it all right, then it’s no better than the rolled out dough, IMO.
THAT SAID,
everytime I make it, I do give it a few tosses, but really just to keep up appearances.