For The Best Pizza Crust, Don't Skip This Step

The main goal when cooking pizza at home is simple: get as close to creating the perfect pizza crust as you can, even without a fancy pizza oven. Of course, there are a lot of steps to follow before you ever begin putting any sauce or toppings onto the pizza. This is a period where it's very possible to commit mistakes that will make your dough too tough or difficult to properly shape. When you're stretching it out flat and forming crusts on the edges, you need the dough to be soft enough. There's some back and forth regarding whether pizza dough should ferment at room temperature or in the fridge. Either way, if it has been sitting in the fridge, you should let the dough sit at room temperature for about 30 minutes before you start stretching it. If you're using frozen pizza dough, a 3 to 4-hour thaw at room temperature will give you the same results.

Why warm up the dough? Essentially, pizza dough is much easier to reshape if you give it time to come to room temperature first. Pizza dough is made from gluten, a protein found in lots of wheat-based foods, and gluten is less flexible in colder temperatures. If you try to stretch out dough that's too cold, you might find that it keeps snapping back to its original clumpy shape when you need to press it down flat. This could lead to overhandling the dough, making it tough. Thirty minutes should be enough to help the gluten relax to the point where it can be more easily reshaped.

If you're making pizza dough by hand, the period where you let the dough sit out should ideally come just after the bulk fermentation period, or the first rise. This is when the dough is just a single lump left to ferment for a long period of time. Why? Longer fermentations are a great way to draw extra flavor from the dough. Keep an eye on the temperature while you're letting the dough relax, because you don't want the dough to get too hot either. Room temperature is typically considered to be around 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Once you get past 90 degrees Fahrenheit, the gluten quality starts to degrade, and it won't ferment properly.

Of course, this is less of an issue if you're choosing to entirely ferment the dough at room temperature, which is less common but still entirely possible. The only drawback of a full room temperature fermentation is that the "Goldilocks" window where the dough has fermented to the right amount will be shorter than cold fermented pizza. If you really want to be precise about bringing your pizza to room temperature, you might invest in a pizza stone to help with perfectly crispy crusts. These porous, ceramic slabs are designed to more evenly distribute heat during cooking, but they can help keep the dough's temperature even anywhere.