If you’re making pizzas at home with any regularity, you’re going to need a way to sauce your pies. You can certainly do this with a ladle or even a large spoon, but if you want to get a little deeper into the pizza-making rabbit hole, consider buying a spoodle or two.
What is a spoodle?
A spoodle, also known as a portion-control ladle or portion controller, is essentially a flat-bottomed ladle.
The name is a portmanteau of spoon and ladle. On a tour I once took of Domino’s HQ, their corporate chef claimed that a Domino’s employee invented the spoodle in the ’80s to give himself a leg up in the chain’s Fastest Pizzamaker competition.
Why use a spoodle?
Using a spoodle helps in two ways:
First, they come in various portion sizes—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 ounces—which ensures consistency when saucing your pizza. (Is there a 7-ounce spoodle? Not that I’ve seen!)
Second, they have a big ol’ flat bottom, which helps spread the sauce quickly and evenly. (If you think about it, the hemispherical bottom of a ladle only makes contact with the dough in a very small area, at its south pole, if you will—whereas a spoodle has a larger surface area for spreading that sauce.)
What size portion-control ladle should I buy?
For home pizza cooks, I recommend a 2-ounce (59-mL) and a 3-ounce (89-mL) portion-control ladle.
For the 12- to 14-inch size pizzas many home cooks make, 3- to 4-ounces of sauce is plenty. A 3-ounce ladle will work if you like a lighter-sauced pizza, and for a 4-ounce pour, you can simply use two scoops of a 2-ounce ladle.
How to use a spoodle
It seems obvious, but there’s a small trick I learned to spreading sauce on pizza dough while working at Paulie Gee’s in Brooklyn. And that trick is to keep firm contact between the ladle bottom and the dough while you spiral the sauce around.
You don’t want to press so hard that you’re mashing the dough into the work surface, but you don’t want to go too light, either—too light a touch means you’re not pushing the sauce around.
Fill the portion-control ladle to the rim with sauce, pour the sauce into the center of your stretched pizza dough, and then press the ladle firmly into the pool of sauce. Maintaining firm contact, spread out the sauce in a spiral, working from the center out. If you’re making New York–style or Neapolitan pizza, make sure to leave a 1/4- to 1/2-inch margin (6–13mm).