Use These 25 Terms and Sound Like a Pizza Professional!

Spend enough time in the controlled chaos of a pizzeria and you’ll start to notice that there’s a whole other language being used. Here’s a collection of terms you can use around the pizza oven that will make you sound like a pizza professional!

#inthepizzabusiness

1. Bones

When someone eats just the part of the pizza with the toppings and leaves the crust (bones) behind.

2. Cheese pull

A term used in advertising to describe the stringy cheese connecting the slice to the pizza when you pull it apart.  The longest recorded cheese pull was by Carlo Alberto Orecchia who pulled a 41.5 inch string of cheese from a pizza slice.

3. Cheese lock

The art of adding cheese over the toppings, to the edge between the sauce and the crust, to “lock” the toppings in place.

4. Corniccione

The raised, puffed edge of the crust of the pizza.  Usually fairly thick, crunchy on the outside and soft and chewy on the inside.

5. Cut

A slice of an Old Forge rectangular pizza called a tray, not a pie. “A cut of a tray”

6. Fly pie

When you need a replacement pizza fast because something when wrong with the first one.

7. Front door

The front opening of a wood-fired pizza oven

8. Hole structure, or crumb

The soft, webbed bread-like inner structure of the crust. Used in baking to describe the denseness of the bread and the size of the holes caused by the aeration of the dough.

9. Isosceles

Describes a slice from a perfectly cut pizza, even though one side is curved.

10. Leopard spotting

The blistering of the pizza corniccione that creates a black spotted pattern typical of a traditional Neapolitan pizza.

11. Mutz

Mozzarella cheese

12. Party Cut (Tavern Style)

Cutting a pizza into squares instead of wedges.

13. Pie

A word that describes an entire pizza.

14. Pizzaiolo

Italian for pizza maker.

15. Pie in the sky

Describes the process of passing stretched dough down the line to the other side of the kitchen.

16. Pizza Slide

When you pick up a slice and the toppings slide off like an avalanche.

17. Pizza Palate

Burning the roof of your mouth with hot pizza.

18. Plain

In NYC, “plain” means cheese with no toppings. Outside of New York this is called “cheese.

19. Pot cheese

A coarse type of cottage cheese.

20. Reggie Alert

An alert given when a tourist walks in and the staff prepare for the worst.

21. Rockers and Rollers

Different types of pizza cutters. A roller is the standard pizza-slicing wheel while a rocker describes a pizza cutter with a curved blade named after the rocking action when cutting.

22. Soggification

When the pizza crust gets soggy from too much sauce or from condensation in the box.

23. Slap out some skins

Stretching out balls of dough into pizza bases

24. Snag ‘n’ Drag

Taking a slice of pizza off the tray.

25. Three Bears-Style

When a pizza is cut into uneven sized slices.

 

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Belforno Perfect Pizza Dough Recipe

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