18/12/2020
Why Is My Pizza Crust Hard? How to Make Perfect Crust.
The most common reason pizza crust turns out hard and dry is that the pizza has baked for too long at a low temperature. To get a good crust, the pizza has to be baked quickly at a high temperature. Other reasons pizza crust gets hard are that the dough is too hard, didn’t rise properly, or the use of a rolling pin.
Pizza Crust Should Be Crispy, but Not Hard
A great pizza crust is crispy, not hard. That’s an important difference.
You’re Not Baking the Pizza Correctly.
If your pizza crust is too hard, you’re most likely baking the pizza at a low temperature for too long. The opposite of how a Neapolitan pizza is baked – quickly in a very hot oven. But why does that make such a huge difference?
The problem is is that at a low baking temperature, you need to bake the pizza for a much longer duration to get a nice, color on the crust. This gives the heat a lot more time to pe*****te the dough. Sometihgn that will vaporize all the moistur, essentially drying out the pizza crust.
To fix this, what you need to do, is to increase the baking temperature. This will allow you to can bake the pizza faster. The most obvious thing to do is to simply turn up the temperature of your oven. I recommend going for the highest setting. But there are a few more things we can do to further increase the temperature to improve your pizza.
Make sure your hydration is right.
Pizza dough hydration is simply the amount of water compared to flour in the dough. This is usually stated in percentages. E.g 60% hydration. That means the amount of water in the dough is 60% of the amount of flour. So a 60% hydration dough can have 1000g of flour and 600g of water.
The lower the hydration, the amount of water compared to flour, the dryer the dough will be. Which again will result in a harder crust when you bake the dough. The reason is that the water will evaporate faster, drying out the dough. In a home oven, longer baking time is inevitable, this is a bigger issue than in a wood-fired oven, that can reach 1000°F.
Using a Rolling Pin.
Using a rolling pin will ruin that great dough you spent the better half of your Saturday making. The reason is that you squeeze out all that CO2 that makes the pizza crust nice and airy. The result will be a flat hard crust.
You should, therefore, stretch out the dough by hand.
