How to make a crispy bottom pizza crust

Pizza has come a long way in my short years as a pizzaiola. One of the things I love about our industry right now is how hungry people are for information. Pizza makers now want every last detail about how to make the perfect pizza and that information is relatively easy to track down with the internet and cell phones.

Everyone is obsessed with learning how to perfect their fermentation to maximize flavor. And with the improvements behind electric ovens, there is now a great oven for everyone depending on your needs.

If looking at Instagram or any other social media platform there are a few shots that everyone has on their feed.

The side crumb shot, the top/side shot of the whole pizza, and the infamous booty shot. Showing off the perfectly cooked bottom is a badge of honor just as much as the interior crumb. Not only does this shot show off any char or beautiful coloring but it also will show how sturdy the pizza is. Being able to pick up your pizza without it sagging in the middle shows how great of a bake you have all the way through. It proves your pizza is structurally sound and has the perfect crisp. So, how do you obtain the perfect bottom bake? Let’s analyze.

From articles past we now know that water contributes a lot to crispier doughs when we look at styles like Roman. Thin-crust pizzas, on the other hand, tend to be on the lower end of the spectrum. Yes. Water plays a crucial role in a crispy bottom, but a lot has to do with the oven and factors contributing to the pizza before it ever goes into the oven.

Before I put a pizza in the oven, I’m looking at the make line.

Where is the dough being stored? Is enough dough pulled out, sitting at room temperature to facilitate the speed of service on that given day? Is dough being left to come to temperature in stages so that by the time it gets to the oven it’s up to room temperature or is dough being forgotten about in the heat of service and being stretched cold?

Cold dough is one the easiest problems to counteract and is one of the most common mistakes I see in pizzerias. Cold dough cooks too quickly on the outside and is hardest to cook thoroughly on the inside. Using room temp dough will ensure that it cooks all the way through achieving the perfect crisp from top to bottom.

The oven itself and understanding the cooking process contributes to the bottom bake. There are many different ovens to choose from and picking the right one for your pizzeria is the first step. Understanding how to properly cook in that chosen oven is paramount, and not just learning how to cook when it is slow, but also how to adjust your cooking when it’s chaotic and your oven is being challenged. Electric ovens are getting a lot of hype and for good reasons. They can reach higher temps than gas ovens and there are ways to manipulate the top and bottom elements to ensure even cooking. But the process is the same, regardless of the type of oven you have.

There are three different types of heat that contribute to the baking of a pizza. Conduction, which is the transfer of heat from the stones surface. Convection, the transfer of heat through the air or a fluid, and Radiant heat which is the expelling of heat outwards into the dome and then bouncing back. When you’re thinking about how to load your oven on a busy night you need to think about maximizing the space but also how to manage the depletion of heat and the recovery time. Some pizzerias use conveyor ovens, which can be great for pan pizzas and extremely easy to use and train employees on but are notorious for underbaked bottoms. Most conveyor ovens don’t have stones which removes conduction from the baking equation. To bake a pizza, the dough would need to be placed onto a screen and then it would go through but it is always easy to tell who is using a conveyor because the bottoms will not brown as well as the top and there will be the telltale imprint left on the bottom from the screen. Some conveyors have learned and have changed their designs to using stone-like slats to combat this problem.

During the cooking process the pizza absorbs the heat from the stone underneath to cook the dough.

For the first few pizzas of the day, each will cook to near completion in that same spot it was placed in because the oven was preheated, and the chamber is 100-percent hot everywhere. Over the course of a busy dinner these spots become cold. Most crews are trained to look for the spot where the previous pizza was cooked and to place the next one in or near that same exact place. This works to a point. Midway through a busy night you will notice the bottoms are no longer cooking at the same rate as the top and your cook times are becoming longer and longer.

For electric ovens, this is when you learn to manipulate the top and bottom settings to counteract the drop in temperature within your stones and to help speed up the recovery time of your stones to get them back to 100 percent and performing at peak volume.

For wood, gas and coal ovens, that luxury does not exist. The oven person can feed their fire increasing the temp within the chamber but without giving the stones time without a pizza cooking on top, those stones will not come back to 100 percent quick enough. This is when a hot spot comes into play. When I was learning how to run an oven, regardless of the kind, I was always told to leave one or two spots open as the “hot spots”. These spots were reserved for finishing pizzas. As the stones cool down through a busy service you need a spot that is at 100 percent to finish off the bottom and prevent the dreaded white soggy bottom.

Cooking a pizza with a perfect bottom bake comes down to finding the right temperature for the chamber and the type of dough you have, keeping hydration in consideration, and learning how to properly manage your slow and peak times.

Dough is a living thing. Just as we experience different changes in temperature throughout a day and will throw on a sweater or take a jacket off to regulate our body heat, elements will have to constantly change to ensure your pizza and bottoms are consistently coming out the same and as crispy as you want them to be.

Laura Meyer is the owner of Pizzeria da Laura in Berkeley, CA.

>> Explore answers to more common pizza dough questions in Troubleshooting your Pizza Dough: What’s wrong with my pizza dough? <<