P.S. i’m sorry for my ugly english

MaryAnn, thanks for the pizza tossing primer! Honestly it made me feel like I will never be able to do it, but I like a challenge. Also, it strikes me that it must be something that you have to learn physically, and once your hands remember how to do it, it’s all downhill from there. (Again: hands!)

Also, I don’t think there’s good NY-style pizza in Colorado. Maybe there’s good pizza, as in tasty, but I’m even more skeptical about Colorado pizza than California pizza (I can say this because I grew up in Colorado in a town founded by Italian coal miners!).

I’m not going to pretend that I’m some kind of NY-style pizza prodigy or something… but I do know a thing or two about crust.

First, a properly made pizza dough doesn’t really require any or much flour to stretch into shape. It should be tacky to the touch, but not sticky. So this should take care of your cloud of flour: don’t use any (or much).

Second, the only reason for tossing it up in the air is to stretch it out while keeping it in a circle. There are a few steps that I have taken to get really good pizza crusts. First, you have to get the ball of dough into a disc shape, then take it in one hand and use the other hand to slowly stretch it. It works best if you hold it perpendicular to the table/counter and do it pretty quickly. This also helps the middle to be thinner. Then, once (or if, as the case may be) it’s too big to keep up with that, form your hands into fists (thumbs in) and stretch your dough around and around the backs of your hands and knuckles. The larger your crust, the harder this gets. That is where the tossing comes in. And I’ve tried tossing a pizza – it’s harder than it looks. The key is speed and not height. Lower tosses have better odds of making back onto your hands. And you want it to go fast enough that it stretches the dough, but not so fast that it goes flying across the kitchen. I would say that if any one of these techniques works better than the others, stick with it. I find the two-hand stretching method the easiest and it produced the best circle.

Third… if you’re using a mix or something from a can (I always do because I’m lazy, but I don’t care too much), it’s going to be about a thousand times harder.

Anyway, I also wanted to tell you that I really enjoy reading your blog, whether you post about pizza or not. And I’m really sorry this comment is so long!

PS: I’m not really sure if there is any good NY-style pizza here in Colorado either. Then again, I haven’t really looked too hard.

Okay, here’s the only tip I have: it’s all in the hands. The guy would use his knuckles to work the dough and move it about. I guess this is how the edges stayed a bit thicker than the middle. He didn’t toss the pizza about too much and never had a cloud of flour about him. All I know is that every slice of pizza was perfectly made from the right amount of sauce to the perfect amount of high quality cheese to a crispy enough crust that didn’t buckle when you went to fold the slice together.

It’s weird that California doesn’t have any good NY style pizza places. Norman, Oklahoma did and I found some great places wandering around Boston. There’s a place by the Mass Ave T-line stop that I thought was a hoot but I think my opinion might have been clouded by too much alcohol and hunger.