How to Stretch (Open) Pizza Dough By Hand

in this video I'm going to demonstrate how to properly open or stretch pizza dough by hand and this is opposed to the grave sin of rolling a pizza deal with a rolling pin which condenses the texture and just ruins everything alright so this how you want to really open up a pizza dough so you want to start by using a copious amount of flour on your board so I'm just going to make the dough a lot easier to work with and then dust both sides of your pizza dough that has been proved so this is our Neapolitan pizza dough and you'll notice that it's really beautiful to work with because we went to that long fermentation process so the first step is you're going to flatten it into a disc and then take the pads of your fingers you don't want use the tips you want to use the pads of your fingers because they are a flatter surface and you want to press the gas in the center of that dough out to the perimeter of that dough later when you place the pizza in the oven that gas will expand rapidly and give you a beautiful cornichon or crust now as you do this you might find some bubbles spring up on the edge and those bubbles will expand and burn during the baking process so if that happens you want to skim them a pinch to pop those bubbles just like that and continue with the forming process now once you press the gas out into the edges of the dough and the dough has stretched enough to where you can place the palm of your hand inside the crust it's big enough to do that then you're ready for the next step and so you're going to place your right hand just gently down on the dough to hold it and using your left hand stretch the dough out to the 9 o'clock position and you're going to use the fingers the pads of your fingers again not your tips but the pads to catch right underneath where that perimeter is right so you have that gas filled perimeter which is going to be your crust and you're going to catch your finger pad just underneath as you pull out gently and let the dough talk to you it'll tell you when it's done stretching the side of the dough that it's stretched to 9 o'clock isn't going to be placed at 6 o'clock on your wrist you're turning your palm up as you stretch over right so stretch to 9 palm up move to 6 stretch 9 palm up move to six and each time you're doing that you're giving the dough a quarter turn now also as you're flipping your palm back downwards you're creating this quarter turn which is giving you a little bit of rotation and centripetal force and what that's doing is its allowing the pizza dough to expand and stretch naturally by that centripetal force so it's going to give you a round or more even stretch now once you get better at this you kind of get the muscle memory down you go a little bit faster and the faster you can do this actually the better because the dough which is opens up naturally into a disc as shown here so again you have your three discs of Neapolitan pizza crust and this is the same technique that I use to open up any sort of round pizza and you can see that I first just gently flatten them into a disc just kind of press them flat and then I'm using the pads of my fingers to press the gas into the crust and it's really important to allow the dough to kind of speak to you as you're going you want to be able to feel though feel how the gas is moving in the dough feel its responsiveness you can see how that gas moves to that perimeter and then as I'm stretching the dough I'm feeling it as I'm going right and it seems kind of you know cheesy but you really do have this relationship with the dough the dough will speak to you and so as you're stretching it the dough will say okay that's as far as I want to stretch right if you stretch it further the dough is going to tear it's going to form a weak spot and as you just kind of play pattycake with the dough and you're going back and forth you're stretching the dough to nine and flipping to six stretching to nine flipping the six the dough is going to just naturally open itself up into the proper side which here for Neapolitan pizza is going to be a twelve inch disc and this is going to be the most rapid way to open up your pizza dough or to stretch your dough by hand and it's also going to give you the best results so this is the most efficient way but also to when you use a rolling pin it condenses the dough and it gives you a more dense texture which is not what you want you want your dough to be light and airy and Julie and delicious

Channel: Jacob Burton

Views: 705,316

Keywords: stella, jacob burton, cooking, food, culinary school, restaurant, how-to, recipe, recipes, easy, simple, cook, food network, fast food, party food, pizza, stretch dough, neapolitan pizza

Id: FR2Teqs4qc4

Length: 4min 28sec (268 seconds)

Published: Sun May 08 2016