Our pizza crust doesn’t seem to have much flavor. What can we do to improve the flavor of our crust? If you are allowing your dough to ferment overnight in the cooler, or several hours at room temperature, in all probability your dough has enou...

Like other types of yeast leavened bread doughs, pizza doughs will benefit from fermenting for a period of time before using or baking it. Fermentation provides dough conditioning, making the dough easier to shape. It also reduces the propensity of t...

Question: We bake our pizzas at 600 F and they are crispy when they first come out of the oven, but they soon turn soft and chewy. What can we do to keep our pizzas crispy longer? Answer: Three things come to mind that might be causing your problem. ...

Question: Is there a good way to fix dough stickiness without drying it out? A sticky dough can indeed create a sticky situation. There are a number of things that can cause the condition, therefore there are a number of solutions to the problems. So...

One commonly overlooked aspect of dough management is that of temperature control. Temperature, temperature, temperature — our life in the store revolves around temperatures. The temperature of the cooler and oven, the holding temperature of th...

Dough Mixing / Proofing Temperature Essentials Our Dough Doctor addresses dough, water temperatures By Tom Lehmann I’ve heard you say that the temperature of the dough after mixing is the single most important aspect of dough management. Would ...

What causes pizza dough to become tough, and how can you avoid it in the future? Flour Protein Content There are a number of things that can cause a pizza crust to become excessively tough or chewy. The tough and chewy stage is set when a high protei...

Q: I am new to the pizza industry and I have read about “proofing” dough. Would you explain what this is and why it’s done. A: Proofing, or rising, is done primarily to allow the dough to achieve a greater height, or lightness than it would if ...

Herb Infused Dough When making a flavored crust, is there a rule of thumb for how much dried herbs to add to the dough? When adding either onion or garlic to the dough, you must be careful not to add too much. Both onion and garlic have a significant...

Pizza Margherita still popular menu addition You may have heard this story before (and surely from me at one time or another, either at International Pizza Expo or in the pages of this magazine), but it bears retelling. When pizza Margherita came alo...

It seems like we are always looking for something more flavorful in pizza crusts and breadsticks. One answer to this search is sourdough. Sourdough has been in use much longer than yeast as we know it today. We know that some type of sourdough was us...

Dough Uses Stuff It! Find new sales with stuffed crust pizza Pasquale “Pat” Bruno How much do we know about stuffed crust pizza? I know that the idea of stuffing, say, cheese into a crust is not new. In fact, as I recall, a family in New ...