What Makes For A Great Pizza Crust?

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A Chicago thin crust style pizza with pepperoni and pepperoncini. | Matthew Danbury

By Matthew Danbury,

For more than five years, I've had a blast making pizzas at home with friends and family. The whole ordeal of topping your own pizza and launching it into the oven is so fun that at first I was able to look past the fact that my crusts were considerably denser and/or flabbier than those I could get at local parlors and slice shops.

But truth be told, the crust is really what distinguishes good pizza (i.e. all pizza) from great pizza, and in the time since, I've spent a good deal of time trying to figure out what makes for a great pizza crust?

To Zeroth Order, Equipment

As a person in their 20s moving from apartment to apartment, I was incredibly reluctant to invest in a cumbersome 20-pound pizza steel and a hilariously large loading peel. But I waited to my own detriment: in a home oven, it is simply not possible to transfer heat to your pizza quickly enough without the thermal mass and conductive heating that a pizza stone (preferably steel) provides.

After begrudgingly accepting the laws of physics and joining the ranks of the pizzaioli by dropping 60 dollars on what was basically two large pieces of metal, my crust quality skyrocketed.

Beyond That, Technique

With this new equipment, I was also able to tap into the expertise of my favorite food YouTuber, Brian Lagerstrom. Brian's baking content is some of the best I've encountered. It just so happens that Brian has a whopping 28 videos devoted to pizza, in which he explores a number of regional pizza styles from across the US and Italy.

In comparing these recipes, I was able to pick up on some broader trends. While he has a number of pizza dough recipes that come together within a few hours, many of the recipes he has made to express a regional style in its fullest involve cold fermenting the dough for up to several days. According to Brian, this technique enhances both the flavor and the crispiness of the crust.

Another observation was that lower hydration doughs used more fat, and vice versa. This persisted across all styles I compared. While techniques like fermenting, kneading, shaping, and baking varied across these styles, these relative amounts of fat to water seems to be a constant of great crust.

References

Code for this project is available on GitHub