Don’t Throw Out Torn Dough….Try this Instead! | Pizza University & Culinary Arts Center (2024)

FAQs

When you get tears or holes in your dough you should? ›

With your fingers, gently pinch one edge of the whole of the tear and pull it over the entire tear. Firmly pinch down to seal the dough and be careful not to re-stretch that area.

The underdeveloped gluten molecules will cause your dough to flop around and tear easily. While underworked dough can simply be fixed by a little more kneading, severely overworked dough cannot be fixed. Instead, the overworked dough will result in a hard loaf that will likely not be eaten.

But tossing your dough can also give it a unique texture and flavor that can be impossible to achieve when rolling it out. This texture is light and soft, and is both more tender and crisper.

Right after mixing, you usually start with a sticky messy dough that rips apart easily, that's because the gluten structure is still weak.

Kneading: Building the Dough's Structure

Gluten forms when proteins in the flour mix with water, and kneading helps align these proteins to create a strong, stretchy network. Properly kneaded dough will be smooth, elastic, and easy to shape, ensuring a perfect crust for your pizza.

When pizza dough has not been kneaded enough, the gluten can't develop and strengthen. The dough will be sticky and the appearance of the dough surface will be rough. It will also make it difficult to stretch. Solution: Knead the dough for longer.

Because of its porous nature and imperfect surface, a pizza stone is able to let evaporating steam and moisture escape more readily. More importantly, the pizza stone heats evenly and holds a high heat well throughout cooking. The goal is to achieve a crisp, evenly baked crust.

Too little folding can result in weak dough. But too much folding can produce excessive tension and compressive forces. An over-folded dough might have a tighter crumb as the layers of alveoli push against each other and coalesce. In the worst case, excessive folding might cause a dough to tear under too much tension.

Gluten is what makes dough elastic and stretchy. If your gluten hasn't developed enough, it will remain too tight and your dough will want to spring back into its original shape.

Is it rude to leave pizza crusts? ›

Some people like to eat their entire pizza crust, and others don't, eating the toppings and the cheese while leaving that outer layer of pizza dough sitting on their plates. Many restaurant owners have come to accept this and chock it up to the fact that some people just don't like eating wholesale pizza dough.

How important is it to spin the pizza dough when making a pizza? It's an efficient way to stretch the dough evenly, because spinning distributed the force across all of the dough at once. It's important if you want the thin,crisp/chewy crust of a traditional Neapolitan pie.

Excessive dough absorption

Pizza dough becomes too sticky when it absorbs too much water. Over-absorbed dough can also be easy to overstretch and tear. Solve this problem and salvage the pizza crust by incorporating more flour, a little at a time, into the dough.

Excess yeast causes extra air bubbles to form, creating holes in the baked bread. You prepared the recipe correctly. The interaction of the various ingredients and the preparation method used for French bread and sourdough bread are intended to create a bread which has a coarse texture and uneven holes.

If your pie dough breaks and crumbles when you try to roll it out, it's probably too dry. ... Just sprinkle some cold water over the dough with your fingers and work it in—gently! —until the dough comes together. If your dough gets too warm, send it back into the fridge to chill out.