How This Guy Became a Pizza Spinning World Champion

[drum music]

I'm Justin Wadstein.

I'm a 13 time World Pizza Champion

and this is how I spin dough.

[groovy music]

[Narrator] Wadstein is one of the world's

most dexterous pizza dough tossers.

He can twirl it.

He can flip it.

He can roll it across his shoulders.

In his hands, dough becomes a magical medium

of pizza expression.

Yeah, it just becomes a fluid movement,

almost like part of you.

It is like a dance partner

'cause you're moving around the dough

and it's moving around you.

[Narrator] Wadstein's mastery of the pizza dough spin

has cinched him numerous World Pizza Championships.

Yes, there are pizza competitions,

but there's a catch.

If you were to want to get involved with the competitions,

for one, you have to work at a pizzeria.

So it kind of makes it special for people

that actually do it for a living.

Me, personally, I don't just spin pizzas.

I run a pizza place.

The only real requirement is you work in a pizza shop

and you put in a lot of practice.

[Narrator] Wadstein's practice has definitely paid off.

I've won seven individual acrobatics,

two team acrobatics.

I've won something called Pizza Triathlon three times

and I've won World's Fastest Pizza Spinner once.

[Narrator] Wadstein specializes in what's known as

pizza acrobatics.

Someone asked me what acrobatic pizza spinning is

because unless you've seen it, it's super hard to explain.

They just kinda look at you

until you show them or explain to them.

Normally, if people don't know what it is,

at first, they don't think it's that cool

or it doesn't sound that cool

and then when you start doing it,

it kinda blows people away.

And that's basically a synchronized dough routine,

where you're incorporating tricks.

Normally, you have some type of theme to your show.

Think of almost like a gymnastics routine with pizza dough.

[groovy music]

The rules are, well you can't do fire because of me.

[crowd cheering and whistling]

[Narrator] That's not the only guideline

for judging though.

There's different categories.

So synchronization, so if it's synchronized to the beat

and the music, then you'll score high points there.

Originality, creativity.

For example, I did a routine in Italy,

where I juggled a soccer ball and pizza dough

at the same time.

Dexterity, which means how well you're working

with the dough.

So if you're spinning it and it's looking like a football

the whole time or it's constantly got a hole in it

or something like that, you'll get scored a little lower.

But, if they're staying circular and they're not ripping,

you'll score higher.

Pizza spinning, the competitions,

the acrobatic pizza spinning competition,

has been around since the '80s.

So a little over 30 years it's been going

and every year, it gets bigger and bigger.

[Narrator] Like any skill, there are fundamentals,

and for acrobatic pizza, that's the basic toss.

Becoming a World Pizza Champion

doesn't just happen overnight.

It's a lot of practice and the first thing

you wanna start with is the basic toss.

What I do, is I put my fingertips at the edge

and kinda stretch it like a rubber band.

And then you're gonna twist and throw up with one hand

and catch with the other.

Just like this.

Right, from there, you can practice that several times

and you'll get to a point,

where you can roll it into the next toss without stopping.

And then the next step is learning how to spin

on your fingertips.

So, what makes spinning on your fingertips hard

is that you have to balance not breaking the dough.

So dough's a lot different than say someone juggling

or something like that because the shape of dough changes.

You have to be able to feel where it's gonna break through

and your fingers, you start to learn that feeling

and spin almost around that spot.

You have to balance it.

It's not quite your fingertips, 'cause it'll break through,

it's almost like the side of your hand.

[Narrator] Then, there's the critical transition trick

called the whip.

And what that is, is basically going hand to hand.

And so you're kind of, your hand goes up and around,

you catch, throw it back, just like that.

So when you get fast with that,

that's the way you can kind of transition

and switch directions of the dough quickly and smoothly.

This was actually the hardest thing for me to learn,

but it's a good thing I did

because I can so quickly change tricks.

What makes it hard is making your mind wrap around

switching directions constantly and being able to catch it

while it's moving really fast.

So it took a long time to perfect doing that.

[Narrator] The whip isn't just a flashy trick.

Pro spinners use it to keep their dough circular.

So the whip will also help if it starts to become oval.

You can whip it back into a circle, basically.

And also, if the center is getting really thin,

then you can at least do that and not rip it.

[Narrator] Once you're comfortable with the toss,

the finger spin, and the whip,

it's time to move into advanced maneuvers,

like over the shoulders.

And the way you're gonna do that

is you're gonna turn sideways, put your head forward,

and you kinda do this, catch it over here.

Another cool trick is called the sky high

and that's when you throw it up

and roll it down your shoulder.

That one's a really cool one.

I do that a lot.

Also, rolling across your chest is a good one.

There's something called the wheel,

which is just like that.

I learned this with actually a plate

'cause it forces your hand to switch directions,

which is, you have to do it to make the trick work.

[Narrator] Wadstein can spin just about anything flat,

a plate, a cutting board, even a folding chair,

but he says that dough is the hardest thing he's ever spun.

Dough's harder because it can rip.

For example, if you spin a book, it's not gonna rip,

so it's the same consistency.

Where this will change, it'll get thin in some spots,

and thick in some other spots,

and it will rip if you don't spin it correctly.

It's mainly the middle finger spinning,

but it's all four of these fingers

are kind of working together.

So you're spreading the, dispersing the,

instead of one point

because your fingers are gonna go through the dough.

[Narrator] But the dough Wadstein spins in competition

is way different than the dough he serves his customers.

A huge part of what I do is making dough

and if it's not good, you can't pull off a lot of tricks.

Yeah, you need ice water, salt, flour,

and no yeast because you don't want it to rise whatsoever.

The salt helps keep it together, it strengthens.

The more salt in the dough, the harder it's gonna be.

You can dry it out.

You get to a point where you can kinda feel it.

If it feels like it needs more water,

I'll put a little more.

If it feels like it needs more flour,

I'll put a little bit more.

You get to learn what it feels like, basically.

[Narrator] You definitely don't want to eat it.

If you ate this dough, it wouldn't make you sick,

but it would taste terrible.

It would just taste like pure salt.

[Narrator] A single piece of dough might last

just a few seconds while Wadstein is spinning.

He's one of the fastest twirlers

and the tension in the dough is high enough

to render it useless after a few tricks.

That's thanks to some basic physics.

Teachers often use pizza dough spinning

as a way to explain the concept of angular momentum,

showing how a chef's hands exert torque on the dough

and cause it to spin.

When spinning, centripetal force

produces tension in the dough and stretches it out.

That's fine for them, says Wadstein.

You don't actually need to know the physics to do it.

[Narrator] No, Wadstein knows that dough

is never as simple as a math equation.

It's a moving, ever changing mass,

always threatening to pull apart and ruin the show.

Your hands are constantly reshaping the dough

and feeling the thicker part that'll allow you

to spin one dough longer.

I've done it so long that I can literally feel it

if it's starting to not become a circle

and your hands will reshape it and then you spin it,

and then you reshape it.

The whole time you're doing it,

you're constantly trying to keep the shape of a circle,

which is really hard to do when you're spinning that fast

and sending it in so many different directions.

[Narrator] Wadstein has been spinning things

since he was a kid.

For me, it was like, I was kinda ADD a little bit,

so in class I would spin binders.

And I just enjoyed working in the pizza shop

when I was a kid.

So, my grandparents opened a pizza place when I was 13.

We didn't really work the table for a long time,

but I originally learned how to spin a towel

while doing dishes.

Worked my way up to the line.

I moved to Santa Cruz and worked for my aunt,

who runs a place,

and she had this dinner and a show concept.

The whole restaurant stops, all the servers do a dance,

and then they have pizza spinners.

I was it before, but they still have some spinners

that do shows.

[Narrator] In 2005, he entered his first competition

in Las Vegas.

He walked away the top spinner in the U.S.

and ranked fourth in the world.

And his skills caught the eye

of veteran World Pizza Champion, Tony Gemignani,

who invited Wadstein to join

his World Pizza Champion spinning team.

They still spin together.

And he's been a huge, huge mentor to me.

[Narrator] Gemignani and his other team members

were there, cheering Wadstein on as he spun fire

at the World Championships in 2009.

I was the first one to do fire.

I did it at a competition in Italy.

And actually when I first did it,

it was just a big wooden board,

a towel from the hotel nailed to it,

with some gasoline and we lit it on fire.

The pizza spinning does look really cool,

especially when you light it on fire.

I mean, it's just, when you first see it,

it's pretty amazing.

[upbeat music]

Yeah, so you can't do it anymore

and I'm pretty sure it's because of that.

No one knew I was gonna do it.

[Narrator] Wadstein may not be able to use

his fire flourish in competition any longer,

but he still does it in demonstrations.

And even after two decades of spinning,

he's still pushing himself and the dough

to do even more extreme things.

So the reason I keep getting it

is because I keep getting better.

Even still, 20 years later,

I'm still learning new tricks

and I'm still stepping it up and I still love doing it.

[upbeat music]