Pizza Questions: Why Do We Toss Pizza Dough?

When creating a pizza, why do bakers toss the pizza dough?

If you have ever dined in at a pizza restaurant before (especially a restaurant such as Sal’s pizza which uses only the freshest of toppings and ingredients), then you may have caught a glimpse of just how much preparation and love goes into each and every pizza that comes out of the kitchen.

Each individual pizza dough at Sal’s Pizza is crafted by an experienced pizza maker from scratch and is then topped with sauce made from fresh-packed diced tomatoes brought in from only a small group of select California growers. Next, we hand shred 100% mozzarella cheese every single day and top it with the high-quality ingredients that you love before we bring it out, hot and fresh, to your table.

However, as interesting as it can be to watch our pizza makers slice up your ingredients and top your pizza to perfection, there is one particular step of the pizza making process that many people are truly fascinated by―tossing the pizza dough.

While the ancient art of the perfect pizza toss has been known to entrance pizza patrons all over the world with the effortless spins and tosses through the air, this step of the pizza process does more than to entertain wide-eyed pizzeria patrons. When you toss a pizza dough, rather than rolling it, you create a crust that is both more crisp and more tender, which expands more effectively in the oven. Also, the irregular nature of a hand-tossed pizza dough will make each bite a completely different experience.

To help you get a better idea of why we toss our pizza dough, and the many benefits that it brings to our pizza, here is some basic information about the art of tossing pizza dough:

What Does Tossing The Pizza Dough Do?
While many people believe that tossing pizza dough is just a fancy way to shape and stretch out the pizza dough, it is actually gentlest and most efficient way to form the crust. Some pizza manufacturers will use a machine press or a dough sheeter in order to make their crust. However, the end result of this often ends up with a crunchy crust that dries out easily. When dough is tossed by hand, it doesn’t lose quite as much moisture, so therefore the crust is softer.

Spinning the pizza dough the air also helps to create the round shape, with a non-uniform crumb. This means that every single pizza crust is unique―tender in some spots and crisp in others.

How Do We Toss The Pizza Dough?
Crafting and executing the perfect pizza dough toss truly is an art form. If there is not enough air worked and kneaded into your pizza dough before you toss it, even the fanciest of moves will not result in a well-balanced, evenly backed pizza pie. We start by making sure the dough is room temperature and evenly dusted with flour. We then press out the dough until it is the size that we want, drape it over our hands and use our palms to life and spin the dough into the air. Catching the dough on the backs of our fists also helps to provide a flatter and more stable area for tossing. We then repeat until the dough is perfectly tossed and stretched to the desired size.

To truly get a better idea of what a homemade, hand-tossed pizza tastes like, stop by Sal’s Pizza in a location near you and try out one of our famous, Italian-baked pizza pies today.

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