{"id":3998,"date":"2012-11-15T06:00:12","date_gmt":"2012-11-15T11:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allandouglas.com\/blog\/?p=3998"},"modified":"2025-04-21T01:56:41","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T05:56:41","slug":"pizza-dude-skin-flinger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/pizza-dude-skin-flinger\/","title":{"rendered":"The Adventures of Pizza Dude: Skin Flinger"},"content":{"rendered":"

After earning my merit badges for Road Warrior<\/a> and Annoyer of People <\/a>I was taught what I considered the most fun part of pizza making: being a Skin Flinger.<\/p>\n

A pizza starts as a dough-ball snoozing with its siblings in a large fiberglass tray.\u00a0 The Skin Flinger scoops one dough ball out of the tray with a scraper and tosses it onto a floured make-counter.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s step back for a second here and discuss pizza dough.\u00a0 There are a variety of types of pizza crust, from the Chicago Style Deep Dish to the New York Style Thin & Crispy, to the California Style<\/a> (although the Cali is noted more for it\u2019s unusual toppings than a particular formula to its crust, but I believe it was this incarnation that made sourdough pizza crust popular).\u00a0 The deep dish crust is like bread dough placed into an over-sized cake pan for baking.\u00a0 The thin crusts are more of a cracker dough, which uses very little yeast and\u00a0has little elasticity.\u00a0 Both are different from a traditional pizza dough so neither of these are flapped.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

Traditional pizza dough is made up in a giant stainless steel baker\u2019s mixer, \u00a0the bowl tipped and the dough rolled into a heavy tray, placed on a table and a dough cutter uses a knife and scale to portion out the dough.\u00a0 Once portioned, it is balled up and plunked into the fiberglass trays in a grid pattern, leaving a requisite amount of space between them.\u00a0 At this point, the dough balls look like sticky baseballs or softballs.\u00a0 The trays are stacked in a walk-in refrigerator and allowed to age a bit before delivery to the stores, via a refrigerated truck, where they are again stored in a walk-in refrigerator.<\/p>\n

During this aging the dough will rise and spread out.\u00a0 The upper surface develops a bit of a skin and is not nearly as sticky as when it was freshly cut dough, this helps a lot when it comes time to make the dough into a pizza because it is easier to handle with less flour flying around.<\/p>\n

So, the dough ball is on the floured make counter, preferably with the \u201craw\u201d or sticky side down in the flour.\u00a0 We accomplished this by using a large putty-knife like scraper to remove the dough ball and flip it upside down into our other hand, then reach over and drop it onto the counter, right side up again.<\/p>\n

Sprinkle a little flour on top of the dough, and quickly pat the dough out, keeping it round.\u00a0 We did not spend as much time playing with it as the guy in the video below does; we\u2019d flatten it a bit then curve our hands and use the pinkie-finger edges of our hands to quickly form the trough around the edges and finish by hitting it with a couple of quick passes with a rolling pin to flatten and smooth it.<\/p>\n

Now comes the fun part: flapping.\u00a0 We were taught to keep our fingers together and thumbs tucked in against the 1st<\/sup> finger so as not to poke a hole in the dough.\u00a0 Slide a hand under the dough and lift, quickly flip it over the other hand so the edge \u201chooks\u201d over the thumb and 1st<\/sup> finger, a bit of a twist to the wrist of that hand turns the dough and flips it back to the first hand.\u00a0 Repeat this several times to walk your way around the circumference of the dough, then with a smooth sweeping motion, raise your arm and snap the wrist to spin the skin over your head.\u00a0 You catch the flying \u201cskin\u201d on the back of your cupped hands and your forearms and flip it onto a waiting screen.\u00a0 If it’s a little too large, jiggling it a bit will cause the dough to draw up.<\/p>\n

Here is a video demonstration that is the closest I could find to the way we did it Back in the Day.<\/p>\n

\u00a0