Tasty Food
and
Great Times!
THAT’S AMORE
When the pizza dough flies, and why
BY VANESSA SALVIA
T
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10 CHOW! Spring 2011
Drew Marquess
throws the dough for
Mezza Luna
PHOTO BY TRASK BEDORTHA
13 TV’s
Pool, Lottery
Texas Hold’em
here’s a Curious George book about everyone’s favorite
monkey trying to throw pizza dough just like Tony, the
pizzeria owner, does. He flattens the dough into a pancake
and tosses it into the air. One blob of dough lands on a
table where a woman is eating. One blob lands on a coat rack. One
falls on the jukebox, and one falls on Tony’s head.
When I try to throw pizza dough into the air, my experience is
not far removed from that had by poor George. If Curious George
can’t throw dough, smart as he is and with four opposable thumbs,
how can I possibly do it? Turns out, it’s a fairly hard skill to
master. It can take months to learn, even if you have someone
skilled in the art teaching you.
“It takes six months of training to get someone from not
knowing to being able to do it in a rush,” says John Fitzgerald,
co-owner of the two Mezza Luna Pizzeria locations in Eugene. Six
months? “Oh yeah,” he says. Fitzgerald, 42, grew up in West
Caldwell, NJ, 25 minutes west of Manhattan. “I grew up with
pizza my entire life, eating it every day,” he says. “I starting doing
pizza in 1988, then started toward a more culinary career and
decided it wasn’t for me and went back into pizza. I’ve always
been doing hand-tossing and trying to keep that going.”
Fitzgerald shudders to think of the corporate chain shops
co-opting real pizza, with their dough stretching machines and
uninspired pies. “They have conveyor ovens and dough sheeters,
and it’s all machine made, basically,” he says. “That to me takes
the soul out of pizza. When we first opened the downtown location
I had all these people from New York and New Jersey thank me
for being here. That made me feel so good a couple of times I
almost started crying.”
For many pizza people, the art of throwing dough is a lifestyle.
As with Fitzgerald, it’s something that many people grew up with,
thanks to the tradition of Italian pizza makers in the Northeast.
Dave Cappella learned the art of hand-tossing pizza dough 18
years ago when he got his first job in a pizzeria in Charlotte, NC.
“I wasn’t old enough yet to work in New York,” he recalls, his
accent still audible despite years of having lived in the south, “but
I saw it all the time. In western New York, pizza goes all the way
back. There’s a lot of pride involved in it. People in western New
York don’t eat Domino’s and Little Caesar’s, they eat in the
traditional old shops.”
When Cappella moved to Eugene from Southern California a
year ago (he worked at another pizza place down there), Mezza
Luna was the first place he ate. His parents recommended it, and
when he found out that Fitzgerald was from New Jersey, he set
about getting a job.
Cappella has worked at places with dough stretchers, wood
ovens, brick ovens, every kind of place. He sees throwing dough
as an important part of the pizza experience, even though there’s
not a strong technical reason to do it. “It’s more of a showmanship
thing. I would liken it to the flare that a bartender shows,” he says,
“It’s very personal. You don’t want to look like a robot back there.
But it does help, don’t get me wrong.”
The theory is because you’re handling the dough less, it stays
tender. Plus, the faster you get the pizza onto the peel and into the
oven, the more evenly it’s going to cook.
Kids especially love seeing Cappella and the others at work,
throwing dough behind his back and up in the air in Mezza Luna’s
open kitchen. But, he points out, it’s not just kids that think it’s
cool. “We get adults going back there and asking us to teach them
how to throw dough all the time,” he says. “I tell them to get a
part-time job at a pizzeria. That’s what I did!”
I did get a job in a pizzeria, years ago. We had a dough
stretcher, and there was no one on staff to show me how to stretch
dough by hand or toss it. I tried a few times when there were no
customers in the shop, but became disillusioned pretty quickly
when I just ended up with a lopsided blob that flew everywhere
except smoothly from my hands like I wanted it to.
Cappella says for those who want to try teaching themselves,
it’s okay to start flattening the dough ball out with a rolling pin.
“Everybody learns as they go,” he says. “Some people are just
better at it than others. I’ve got soft hands I guess. Some people
throw it up and their hands go right through it.”
Just down the street from Mezza Luna, La Perla Pizzeria goes
about it a bit differently. “We really don’t toss the pizzas,” says
co-owner Gianni Barofsky. In fact, they aren’t allowed to. “We do
stretch them by hand but we don’t toss them,” he explains. “We
stretch and pull them, which is actually the correct way of doing it.”
The Italian government certifies the restaurant as a provider of
authentic Neapolitan thin-crust pizza — in order to be certified,
the owners had to go to a pizza training school. “We can toss it,
our dough does toss well,” says Barofsky. “The double zero flour
we use gives it good strength, but we try and do it as authentically
as we can. One of the things we were taught is at true Italian
pizzerias, you pull the dough… pull it and turn it, pull it and turn
it. By throwing it, it makes it real thin in the center and it doesn’t
make for an evenly stretched dough.”
According to Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (True
Neapolitan Pizza Association, the certifiers), pizza can’t be made
by any mechanical means, including the use of a rolling pin.
The link between Italian pizzerias and the art of tossing dough
is obscure. Perhaps, as Cappella notes, it developed purely out of
a desire for showmanship. Most authentic-style pizzerias can trace
their roots to some Italian pizza maker in the Northeast — the first
pizzeria in the United States is believed to be Lombardi’s, founded
in 1905 by Gennaro Lombardi in Manhattan’s Little Italy.
Fitzgerald isn’t Italian, but he says that pizza is either in your
blood or it’s not. “You can tell within 10 seconds of someone
touching the dough if they know how to make a pizza,” he says.
Watching him and his employee Mike Reisman at the Crescent
Village location make pizzas is like watching a magic show. It
seems an impossible sleight of hand… they both go from a ball of
dough to a ready-to-make large pizza skin in about 20 seconds.
Reisman, who learned pizza in San Diego from some Brooklynite
Italians in 1995, pats the dough out on the countertop with his
fingertips starting in the center, while moving the dough in a circular
motion. Then the palms get involved, and it’s up in the air, then on
the make table waiting for sauce. Blink and you miss it.
Fitzgerald, on the other hand, never touches the center. He
squishes dough from the edges, flattening it into a pancake shape
all the while, ending up with a more pronounced ridge of dough at
the edges. “Your hands become like a tool and die, they only let so
much dough through at one time,” Fitzgerald says. “But also, if a
spot feels thinner I move it through my hands faster. It’s hard to
explain. I always said that if I lost my eyesight I could still make
pizzas, because it’s so much about the feel of it.”
Even though both Mezza Luna and La Perla have different
techniques, and each employee has his or her own method, there is
one thing they all agree on: making dough with a sheeter takes all
the love and passion out of the product. If you can’t quite get the
hang of hand-tossing at home, don’t despair. Even these
professionals don’t know all there is to know. “I’ve been making
pizzas for 18 years,” Cappella says, “and I’m still learning.” ■
chow.eugeneweekly.com