How to Stretch Your Pizza Dough & How To Use a Pizza Peel

[Music] hi folks I'm Nick wellous culinary manager for the companion group in Berkeley California today in this video we're going to show you how to hand strrretch your own pizza dough for most of you making pizza at home this can be the most intimidating part of the whole process but with over 12 years in the pizza industry I've learned a few tips and tricks along the way to help you get over this fear when we talk about hand stretching our own pizza dough at home we're involving three techniques first technique is called proofing the second technique is called pounding and the third technique is finally stretching your pizza when I talk about proofing your pizza dough proofing is simply removing your pizza dough from refrigeration and allowing it to rest at room temperature covered in Saran WRA for for at least 2 but up to 4 hours this is going to give the dough proper time to rise up and become workable the second technique we're talking about today is called pounding pounding is simply pressing on your dough to form it into a shape to be stretched so with pounding what we're going to do is take a small amount of flour we're going to dust our work surface we're going to even the flour out with the palm of our hand so there aren't any pockets of flour hanging out on the bottom of our dough and then we're simply going to pick up a piece of dough and also lightly flour it when I pound my dough I use six fingers three on each hand so what you're going to do is you're going to start by feeling out the crust of the dough this is where we form our crust it's going to be about a/2 in from the edge of the dough ball to 1/4 in depending on how much crust you prefer on your pizza so I'm going to start at the top of the dough ball gently pressing down and moving around the edge of the dough ball when I work around the edge of the dough ball I'm going to want to stay away from the center of the dough ball once I've got a basic crust formed I'm going to go ahead and flip the doughball apply another light dusting of flour and continue to pound around the outside feeling out the crust once we've made roughly two passes on each side we're going to go ahead and go through the center just one time we'll flip one more time around the outside and through the center now we've got the dough into a shape where we can start to stretch it it's roughly a half size bigger than where we started and we can actually pick it up off the table and begin to stretch it when I place the dough on my hands to stretch I'm going to start working with my Knuckles bent inward so that my fingers aren't poking through the dough if you push straight up with your fingers you may end up pushing through to the other side and creating a hole which it's not what we want to do so we're going to start twisting and tossing gently and I'm pulling outside as I'm spinning the D then we can flip the doughball again for consistency continue twisting and rotating once you get to this point if you're feeling brave you can toss your pizza [Music] dough going to twist some more and when you start to get your pizza dough close to the size that you want you can hold it up in the light to see how you're doing you'll notice thin or thick spots and you can adjust accordingly most times when you first start stretching your pizza dough the thickest part is going to be closest to the crust and you can simply put your hands in and adjust that size we'll twist and toss a few more [Music] times and now we're ready to place it on our pizza peel so once you've got your dough the appropriate size for your pizza we're going to take a slly flour our pizza peel going to pick up our dough place it on the pizza peel and now I'm going to show you how to get it moving get it onto your pizza stone or in your pizza oven normally this would be the point where we put our Sauce Cheese and toppings on our pizza but in this video today we're only going to show you how to stretch the crust and how to put the pizza in your oven um so you've got your flowed Pizza Peel your dough is stretched to the appropriate size and placed on your pizza peel and there's going to be two motions that I'm making when I do this there's also there's going to be a side to side left and right to get the pizza skin going and then when I get ready to put it in the oven it's going to be a back and forth it'll be a quick movement forward a short stop and pulling backward to get the pizza off the peel so we're going to start by getting it moving left and right now that the pizza's moving we're going to go back and forth and slide it right off thanks for watching our video today for more tips and tricks check out the other videos on our YouTube channel

Channel: The Union Square Group

Views: 778,345

Keywords: accessories, baking, how to make pizza, making pizza, pizza, pizzacraft, companion, companion group, cooking, flavor, food, pizza dough, dough, flour, how to stretch pizza dough, pizza peels, pizza peel, how to handle pizza dough, Peel (Culinary Tool), Kitchen, How-to (Media Genre), Cook

Id: lz-Yr1q-fKM

Length: 5min 44sec (344 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 03 2014