I have been trying to make pizza at home for a year and it sucks every time. Below is my dough recipe that I put in a bread machine. I use bread flour and enough water that it doesn’t stick to the sides of the machine, but try to ensure it’s not too dry also.
-.5 cup warm water
-2 1/4 tsp yeast
-2 tbsp olive oil
-2 tsp salt
-1 tbsp honey
-1.5 cup room temp water
Wait a few mins for yeast to bloom
-4 cups bread flour
Every time I try to roll the dough out, it snaps back and is infuriating to work with. It always comes out bone dry, but tough as a shoe and gets no rise. I don’t know how to get the dough to the right temperature. It is never easy to work with and I can rarely get it.
I bake in a shitty Samsung oven at 500 and the bottom always seems a little raw. I obviously need a ton of help. Any advice
Is welcome!
by MLC_1240
8 Comments
Need to heat the stone for about an hour at 500-525 before cooking on it. Cold stone will not brown the crust.
Not enough water for starters.
How long do you get the dough rise? Sounds like the gluten isn’t forming. Also during the colder months I put it in a cooler with a pot of hot water because trying to roll cold dough sucks
Edit, oven should be higher temp too. If you cant get it above 500 get a small pizza oven or blast that pizza stone so it it red hot
couple tips: first ALWAYS go by ingredient weight, not cups/tsp’s, you will be waaaay more consistent. second is you need to let you stone heat up for a good 45 min – 1 hour before putting the pizza on. it retains heat better than a pan, but takes much longer to heat initially. third is buy your cheese in block form and shred it yourself. I can tell you’re using pre-shred because the anti caking agents cause it to blacken like yours is here.
A food scale and dough calculator are your friends. Stone stays in the oven. Get a peel.
Oh boy, a lot to unpack here. So much so, that you might want to take a strategic pause and go read a book or two (The Elements of Pizza by Ken Forkish is a good one), maybe watch some YouTube videos, and really get a handle on the basic principles of making pizza. That small investment will go a long way.
In the short term a few things…
Ditch the bread machine. It is not needed and is just making things more complicated than they need to be.
Keep those rolling pins away from the dough. That’s knocking all the air out of your dough and partly contributing to your dense, flat crust. Gently toss/work out with your hands. You don’t have to fling it around like a Ninja Turtle, but a quality dough will stretch with just your hands and gravity.
Get a kitchen scale and weigh your ingredients. Volume measurements are unreliable and it will be hard to find consistent success.
Books and videos will teach you about hydration, a very important concept in pizza making. From your recipe, it looks like you have too little water for the amount of flour you’re using. You usually want the water to be somewhere between 55-70% of your flour by weight. You can go lower or higher but those numbers will get you good results.
You didn’t say much about your fermentation process. That’s extremely important. Again, some research will help you here. But you need at least 3-4 hours to let the yeast do their thing and that’s on the extreme low end.
You didn’t say what style you’re going for but this was my first recipe that I made years ago and it is a trusted winner…maybe give it a go: [King Arthur No Knead Pizza Dough](https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/artisan-no-knead-pizza-crust-recipe)
Hope you keep trying, OP! And report back if you get results you like!
Any more details on your process? I’d venture to guess your stone isn’t preheated properly based on the colour of the underside. Lots of great resources to help. Share your process to start and let’s tweak it! You can do it
Grab a food scale makes it more accurate, for dough snapping back let dough rest 3-4 hrs prior to use. Cold ferment for 2-3 days for rise. Dm me if you want a dough recipe