Homemade pizza repair problem: Torn a hole in your dough? How to fix it like a pro.

​Seems I’ve been repairing my pizza all wrong. Maybe you have, too. Hard to believe this tiny homemade pizza tip is coming to you from The Great Grand Perennial Palace Of Pizza known as the Las Vegas Convention Center. The tip is simple genius, it’s one of the single most useful snippets of pizzamaking intel ever, and I had to share it.
 
Backstory: I’m in Vegas at the 41st International Pizza Expo. That’s the trade show for all things pizza. As someone once said to me, “There’s a trade show for pizza?” I replied that it’s a $65-billion a year industry. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a trade show for that. But using this miniscule bit of pizza wisdom I’m about to share is free, invaluable, and eminently useful in making a pizza at home.

​If you’ve ever felt the despair of tearing a hole in your pizza dough, you’re going to love this.

You may have heard of the world-champion pizzaiola and restaurateur Laura Meyer. After almost 20 years of working with world-famous celebrity pizza guy Tony Gemignani, eventually as his head chef, she opened her own place: Pizzeria da Laura in Berkeley, CA. She’s dynamic and talented and gives an excellent performance on a stage kitchen. And speaking as a longtime marketing geek, I appreciate the sentiment expressed on her restaurant’s website: “Pizzeria da Laura is a love letter to the pizza community of the Bay Area and the quirky people of all ages who raise a glass to the good life.”
 
Anyway, at the Expo, Chef Laura was in the Pizza Expo demo kitchen, teaching a hands-on dough session. She was spinning a pizza dough, demonstrating how its high-gluten properties make it greatly extensible. She was stretching a dough ball intended for a 12-inch pizza into something the size of a circus tent. (Well, OK. Maybe an 18-inch circus tent. But it was big.)
 
And as she’s spinning and stretching this pizza dough to the point where you could almost see through it into the future, a hole appeared.
 
Without missing a beat, Chef Laura spins that dough back onto her worktable and talks about repairing that hole.
 
Apparently, a lot of people see a hole and say, “Into the trash!” In my own world of home pizza, I see a pizza to be repaired. I gather the ripped dough back together and move on. (This method was once confirmed for me as standard by someone who used to work in the kitchen of a popular urban pizza joint.)
 
But like I said, I’ve been doing it wrong. So was my urban pizza-joint source.
 
Ready?
 
You can repair that rip by just throwing a slice of mozzarella over it. Or, if it’s a pepperoni pizza, use a slice of pepperoni. Chef Laura says that customers never notice it.
 
The customers that I’m feeding aren’t even paying customers, so why would they care about that slice of pepperoni—even if it’s not a pepperoni pizza? Unless, of course, they’re vegetarian or keeping kosher. (I get to feed pizza to all kinds of guests with restrictions, and I respect their proclivities. I have one potential guest for whom I have to come up with alternative sauces to address her tomato allergy. Can you imagine having to live with that curse?)
 
Anyway, that’s your Free The Pizza “Saturday-Afternoon Pizza Post” dispatch from Vegas, baby. Got a hole in your dough? Patch it with cheese or pepperoni. I’m also thinking of tearing holes on purpose just to experiment with ham and salami. More to come from Vegas over the next few weeks, including exciting developments in everything from spiral mixers to meatless meat!
 
Keep those pizzas flying!

P.S. After thinking about all this, I did a Google search on "torn dough." There is no more lofty a source than Pizza University in Beltsville, Maryland. They confirm that using a method of pinching the dough back together over the hole is also acceptable. But I admit, the geek in me still loves the cheese hack. It's like patching an innertube. But it tastes better. 

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