If you’d like to make sourdough breadsticks or pizza crust, you’re going to have to start with a sour! Thankfully, there’s nothing to it. Begin by whisking together 1 1/2 pounds of flour and 1 1/2 pounds of water to make slurry. Pla...

The checklist is long and daunting. You know you want to open a new pizzeria, but you don’t know where to begin. And that’s after you’ve already done it once or twice before, let alone if you’re a first-timer. So, where do you begin? With a p...

Have you ever had one of those nights where a storm kept you awake? Then, after getting a few hours of sleep you go to your store to open and find that your dough has blown courtesy of a power outage. It’s a nightmare come true, and panicking is us...

Like a fine wine, rum, bourbon or scotch whiskey, pizza dough is one of those things that just seem to get better when they’re allowed to age a little. There are times when aging, or allowing the dough to ferment, just isn’t an option &md...

Gummy pizzas can be caused by a number of things. One, the pizza may not be thoroughly baked. If the oven temperature is too high, the outer portion of the crust can be nice and brown, but the center has not been fully baked. In these cases, the crus...

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 ...

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 protein (very strong) flour is used to make the dough. Pizza crusts made with a high-protein flour of 13 perc...