Get Perfectly Round Pastry Dough With An Unexpected Kitchen Gadget

Let's say you're making a pie and are trying to roll out the dough for your crust, or maybe you're making homemade pizza and need to work the dough into a perfectly flat, round shape. Either way, while rolling out dough isn't too hard of a process — it's achievable with a very cheap rolling pin — you may not want to spend an abundance of time working on the dough. 

In fact, you might already have a solution in your kitchen. A tortilla maker is more than capable of flattening your dough into round, flat shapes without the use of a rolling pin or your fists. As demonstrated in an Instagram post, all you have to do is sandwich a ball of dough between two pieces of parchment paper and put it in the tortilla press. Once the dough is in the machine, close the lid and press down on the dough the same way you would if you were making a homemade tortilla. It doesn't take long, either: After a few seconds of pressing down, the dough will have been perfectly flattened and spread out into an even, round shape.

While this method is useful, there is one small drawback to using it, so it's best in mind to prevent wasting dough or gumming up your tortilla press.

If your tortilla maker can easily turn misshapen lumps of dough into perfect, flat circles without any real effort on your part, what's the drawback? While this trick is very helpful, keep in mind that this method is best for flattening small portions of dough.

To use a tortilla press to flatten dough correctly, you'll have to first divide your dough into equal (or as equal as you can get) portions. These individual pieces of dough go into the tortilla maker to flatten, which leaves you with small, perfectly round dough circles. If you tried to cram the whole mound of dough into the press at once, you would not only make a mess but could also gum up the tortilla maker due to the excess amount of dough. Your tortilla maker might not even fully close if the dough is too thick.

However, this is still a very good method if you're looking to make mini pies, pizzas, or other small pastries since it saves you time spent trying to press the dough out and cutting out shapes. So, how can you perfectly flatten one large mound of dough all at once without having to cut or divide it?

The problem with using a rolling pin is, depending on the type you have, it may not be able to fully flatten your dough all the way. For example, lightweight plastic rolling pins are better suited for thinner, lighter dough, so they can't effectively flatten the dough down without a bit of effort. If this is your problem and you don't have or don't want to use a tortilla maker, all you need is a heavy wine bottle.

The idea behind using a wine bottle as a rolling pin substitute is that the bottle is very similar in shape to your rolling pin, but is made of a much heavier material. Since it's made of thicker glass, the heavier weight of a wine bottle makes it much easier to flatten any tough dough without much effort. As long as the bottle is even and consistent in shape and resembles a long cylinder rather than anything that widens or narrows radically from the neck or middle, it will work just fine. 

It also doesn't matter if the bottle is full or empty. However, if it is full, you ought to make sure the cork or seal is tight. If it's not, you run the risk of wasting both the wine and your dough.