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The Most Common Pizza Mistakes You Make Without Even Realizing
Everybody loves homemade pizza, but few of us actually make a decent pizza. As
uncomplicated and straightforward pizza is to make, you can easily spoil it if you’re not
paying attention to several things.
Many people think this is a food you just can’t mistake. After all, millions of pizzas are made
daily in the world! Making pizza can be a breeze, however, if you make sure you avoid the
most common mistakes. Below we’ll tell you how.
#1. Rigid pizza dough
Your pizza-making problems start with the dough. No matter you make your dough at home
or you buy it from the grocery store, you have to let it rest for a little before you start
working on it. This is the one and only reason why you may struggle with rigid dough. To
achieve the perfect pizza, you have to work with flexible, stretchy dough. Otherwise, it will
resist all your stretching and rolling attempts and you’ll end up with a small diameter pizza.
The best way to proof your dough is at room temperature and let it sit for about half an
hour before starting to work on it.
#2. Your dough is too hard
Sometimes, we end up adding too much flour, case in which the pizza dough will become
hard as a rock. In other instances, you may overwork your pizza dough. This makes it lose its
elasticity and you’ll end up cooking a slate. However, it’s easy to avoid this costly mistake.
Just buy ‘00’ four and be gentle when working on your dough. This will help you keep all tiny
air bubbles in your dough. Once cooked, your pizza will have a nice, crispy, yet airy crust.
#3. Your pizza ends up soggy
This may be one of the most common homemade pizza mistakes we see. Out of the wish to
make your pizza as rich and loaded as possible, you can end up with too much topping. Keep
the quantities at bay when it comes to sauces and cheese. While this sounds tasty and
appealing in theory, it can cause a lot of trouble. The extra toppings you keep adding to your
pizza will not only make it hard to move from your pan to the oven, but they will also keep
the dough moist and hard difficult to cook. You will most likely end up burning your pizza
bottom, while the middle of your crust is still raw.
#4. You are clueless in terms of pizza sauce
If you are one of those people who spend hours just to make their pizza dough from scratch,
just to top everything off with a ton of pre-made sauce on it. Pre-made pizza sauces lack the
taste complexity, as the specialists at Forno Venetzia explain. The sauce and dough as the
ones that make the absolute difference between a good pizza and an extraordinary one.
Plus, store-bought pizza sauces are full of additives and preservatives, sodium and sugar.
You may want to avoid feeding your family this stuff, as long as you have 15 minutes to
spend making your own sauce. Just search online some recipes, test them and see which
one you like best.
#5. Your baking pan is too thin
We usually lack proper pizza equipment at home. While we all lack the covered brick oven
that makes the pizzas perfect, you still can avoid cooking yours on thin baking pans. Because
of how tin these solutions are, they won’t conduct the heat to your pizza as they should. In
this case, you’ll end up with a sloppy, hard-dough pizza that nobody will ever want to taste.
Pizza HAS to be cooked quickly, so the crust doesn’t end up soggy. Just buy a pizza stone and
get over this issue! These stones are so affordable it’s a shame you don’t have one already!
#6. You don’t season the dough
Even from the beginning, read this as the dough mixing part, you have to pay attention to
the way you season your dough. There is no bigger sin than bland pizza dough, so make
everything you can to avoid it. Apart from a touch of salt and pepper, think about adding
some strong aromas. Basil, rosemary, oregano, thyme, garlic powder or even onion powder
make great choices for pizza dough seasoning.
#7. You use a rolling pin to roll out the dough
You will find some pizza recipes that specifically ask you to roll your dough with a rolling pin.
Just don’t do it! Use your hands to work your pizza dough at the right thickness. A rolling pin
will always be too harsh and will destroy all those tiny air bubbles we mentioned in the
beginning. They will make your crust air and light and you want to preserve them in your
dough as much as possible. Gently stretch your dough with the tip of your hands on a
floured surface. You will achieve a perfect crust, comparable with the Italian one.
#8. You use parchment paper to line your baking pan
Repeat after us: pizza bakes better without parchment paper. As long as you lightly flour
your pizza stone in advance, you have no reason to use parchment paper to line it. The only
thing this product will ever do is prevent your pizza from becoming crispy and perfectly
cooked. Plus, it’s too expensive to ever consider using it.
#9. You don’t preheat the oven enough
Your oven must be hot, and we can’t emphasize this enough! Pizza must be baked in a
matter of minutes to prevent toppings from making it too soggy. Turn your oven on the
highest temperature and make sure you use your roiling function too. This is how you’ll
achieve a perfect homemade pizza.
#10. You don’t precook some of your toppings
Some pizza toppings will require a little more attention on your part. Broccoli, cauliflower,
raw sausages, these all have to be pre-cooked to make it on your pizza. Everything will end
up cooking simultaneously, plus you won’t end up burning your crust!
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