Pizza Making Tips

Different styles of pizza require different cooking temperatures to get the best results—and homemade pizza is no exception. Homemade pizza should be cooked at a temperature of 500F (260C) or higher for 10-12 minutes when using a pizza steel, pizza stone, or parchment paper. If you’re making homemade pizza using a baking pan, it should…

Pizza dough takes time to make, so many people opt to make a large batch and freeze it. Others buy it frozen from the grocery store to begin with. Working with frozen pizza dough isn’t difficult at all, but many people struggle when it comes to how and when to defrost it. The best way…

If you’ve made pizza dough before, you know it can sometimes be a challenge to figure out the right balance of ingredients to get that perfectly airy and tasty crust. Among the most important of these ingredients is yeast – but how much yeast should actually you put in a pizza dough? In general, you…

Have you let your pizza dough sit in the fridge for a few days and now it smells like alcohol? If you’re wondering why that is, and what you can do about it, you’ll be interested in what I’m about to say. Pizza dough that smells like alcohol is perfectly normal – in fact it’s…

Kneading dough is a necessary skill when it comes to making pizza at home, unless you plan on using a no-knead method like I do. So naturally, one of the most common questions I get asked is if you can knead pizza dough too much. The answer is a multifaceted one. You can absolutely knead…

Basil is one of the most common pizza seasonings around the world. It’s in the sauce, sprinkled on top of the cheese and sometimes added as fresh leaves. But when should basil be added to a pizza? In a home oven, fresh basil should be added to pizza after its baked. In a wood-fired oven,…

Pizza dough usually only contains flour, water, yeast and salt, but plenty of people and restaurants have their own secret ingredients. For example, I like to add oil and honey to my pizza dough to help with baking in a home oven. But what about eggs? Pizza dough does not usually contain eggs, especially pizza…

I get a lot of questions about pizza dough preparation – how to handle the dough, how to knead it, proof it, etc. But quite often these questions reveal to me that lots of people don’t understand the most basic concept of baking – how pizza dough rises. Pizza dough rises when the yeast consumes…

Sometimes I take for granted that when I make a pizza dough it’s going to rise in the time I expect it to (or at all). But recently I was forced to diagnose this issue when my dough suddenly decided not to rise. Pizza dough doesn’t rise when the yeast is dead or hasn’t been…

Traditionally, pizza dough has only four ingredients – flour, water, yeast and salt. However, lots of recipes call for adding sugar and oil as well. So, is using sugar and oil just a matter of personal preference and why should they be added in at all? Yes, sugar and oil should be added to pizza…