RSSHey…. Nice Gluten. Love How You Spin that Pizza!
June 11th, 2008 by Carolyn Levy, Instructional Designer
As one of the Instructional Designers at Rouxbe, I’ve been attending “foodie classes” at Northwest Culinary Academy of Vancouver with Tony, one of our Rouxbe Cooking School Instructors.
In one of our last classes, Chef Tony was talking about rolling out the dough to the correct thickness and someone asked him if he could “spin” pizza dough. Now I’ve witnessed the typical toss in the air by the guy in the pizza shop who is trying to draw customers in, but real spinning is something of an art or at least a sport. Little did I know that pizza dough spinning is a worldwide phenomenon.
There are contests all around the globe and from what I’ve seen people are doing wild things with dough. I gave my dough a quick flick of the wrist and decided that I am definitely not a pizza tosser. Let’s just say that there was a lot of scraping off the floor and I had to start my dough all over again. So although I now know how to make really great pizza now, I don’t think I’ll be signing up for spinning contests anytime soon.
P.S. Gluten development in the dough is what makes this all possible. It’s the elastic property in the dough, developed through mixing and kneading. You will learn all about it in the upcoming Rouxbe Cooking School. Click the “Notify me when you launch” if you haven’t already.
Hey, no need to scrape anything of the floor. Pick up a practice silicon crust from these folks: http://www.prodoughusa.com/
It feels just like real pizza dough and flops pretty much the same way. No, I can’t do it like the guy in the video… but I’m getting better. And, hey! It glows in the dark. Happy spinning!