Perfect Pizza at Home

Perfect Pizza at Home

1. Start With a Hot Oven

When making pizza from scratch, start by preheating the oven. Preheat your oven to 500F or 260C for 45 minutes up to an hour before baking. This is a crucial step because a preheated oven will help the pizza cook faster.

Preheating is the secret to the perfect pizza making sure it doesn’t turn out undercooked and doughy. When you cook pizza at a high temperature, it guarantees a tasty and crispy crust.

This is why traditional pizza tastes great when cooked in stone ovens. Stone ovens allow the heat to spread in an even manner when cooking pizza.

2. Refrigerate the Dough

To have the best tasting homemade pizza, you first need to prepare the dough. Refrigerate the dough for 24 hours to slow down the fermentation process. This will develop the dough and cultivate that classic pizza dough flavor.

Refrigerating the dough first also helps in the cooking process. It gives the yeast time to break down the starch in the flour. This creates the needed gas and air pockets to produce a chewy and light crust.

3. Don’t Knead Cold Dough

Allow the pizza dough to reach room temperature before you start stretching it. Remove it from the fridge half an hour before stretching and baking it. This will help relax the dough and avoid any complications when cooking it.

Immediately stretching a cold dough will make it tough, hard to knead, and even harder to form a proper crust. A cold dough rises too much, and working with it will change the desired type of crust. Patience is a virtue in all aspects, and the same is true when working with pizza dough.

4. Don’t Over Knead the Dough

When kneading the dough, you need to know the right amount of time. Because, aside from cold dough, over kneading will make the dough tough. This makes the dough lose its light texture, making it look like bread after baking it.

You will notice that over kneaded dough is hard to stretch. When kneading, most recipes will tell you to do it for at least eight minutes. To avoid over kneading your pizza dough, knead for three to five minutes instead.

5. Stretch, Don’t Roll

Stretch the dough with your hands and avoid using a rolling pin. Stretching by hand gives you more control over the texture, thickness, and shape of the pizza. If you use a rolling pin on the dough, you risk thinning the crust, and this often results in a cracker-like crust.

This happens because you push out the air from the dough and increase the crust’s density. Use your hands to stretch the pizza to create a better texture for the best pizza.

6. Add the Layer of Sauce

When adding pizza sauce, make sure to add a thin layer, even if you’re using fresh tomato slices. This allows you to avoid making the pizza soggy when cooked. Too much sauce makes the pizza moist because there is not enough time for the oven to dry out the toppings.

If you decide to cook it longer, you will ruin the cooking process and overcook the pizza. When it comes to pizza sauce, less is more. A thin layer of sauce to ensure your pizza comes out with a delicious flavor.

7. Add the Cheese

What makes pizza delicious is its cheese content, like mozzarella. However, fresh mozzarella has excessive water content. This can turn your pizza into a puddle of milk.

To achieve that stretchy and stringy cheese when you slice up a pizza, don’t rush with cheese. Make sure to grate, slice, or dice the cheese before adding them. By doing this, you can avoid making your pizza a messy puddle.

You may also use a paper towel to dry up the fresh mozzarella before adding it to the pizza. This allows you to remove excess water content and get the perfect pizza.

8. Add Precooked Toppings

When adding toppings to your pizza, it’s best to pre cook them. Precooking the toppings before adding them to the pizza enhances the flavor. Ingredients like mushrooms and onions are fine to eat raw. However, when precooked, it enhances the pizza’s overall flavor.

It’s best to pre cook vegetables first, and the same works for raw and fatty meats. The advantage of pre cooking the vegetables before adding them is you can dry them. This is another great way to avoid fogging up your pizza.

If you’re using cured meat as toppings, it’s best not to precook them because they’re exceptions. You may also exempt thin slices of vegetables and herbs.

Instead of precooking herbs, add them directly to maximize the flavor. This is the last ingredient you can add to enhance the flavor and create an aesthetic finish.

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