Did you know that Toronto has a school of pizza?

When is a pizza not just a pizza? When it's a crispy, wood-fired Neapolitan or a pan-baked Roman. (Or a Windsor, Ontario pizza. Seriously.) If you want to learn the intricacies of several traditional Italian styles - or just fantasize about impressing prospective mates with your pizza dough-tossing skills - there's a north-end pizza school that promises to turn you into a true pizzaiolo.

School Of Italian Pizza, located just off Dufferin and Steeles, offers one or two-day courses that cover everything you'd expect to go into the pizza-making process - and a few things that you wouldn't, including choosing the perfect flour, the role of levitation and temperature in the final consistency of your dough, and the proper application of the "traditional Neapolitan 'slap'" to open the dough up.

The workshops, geared both towards amateurs and those seeking to sell the fruits of their labours, don't exactly come cheap - their two-day courses on traditional Italian pizza and Roman pizza are $480 each, while a four-hour Neapolitan pizza course is $330. Then again, as that old adage goes, teach a man to make pizza, and he'll quit spending $25 on delivery all the time.

Photo via School of Italian Pizza on Facebook.

by Natalia Manzocco via blogTO