For lots of home chefs, excellent selfmade pizza is the holy grail. It’s a lot harder than it sounds to actually get it). (There are people around who have gone to all kinds of lengths to get the proper taste, from buying flour specially from Italy to modifying their electric ovens to cook at the temperatures you can expect out of a traditional wood fired oven. To have tasty pizza at home, however, it isn’t necessary to do all that much. Just pay attention to a few things, and make sure that you’re using a high-quality cooking method. When all is said and done, at 300 degrees, you’ll never get a great crust.
To avoid soft, “bready” crusts, try to stick with a high-gluten flour, and let it rise adequately. Because of how they’re made, quick crusts, mixes that include baking powder but no yeast, and pizza crust in a can are all likely to produce a poor quality result. If you do not use a relatively strong flour, and give the yeast time to work, you’re going to produce some relatively low-quality pizza. If you want a great pie, don’t take shortcuts.
In general, too, avoid low-quality ingredients. Sure, you might get a bargain on cheap sauces and cheeses, but the taste will be noticable. Poor quality sauces may taste too sweet, or include too many fillers, and many low cost cheeses won’t melt quite correctly. You already know how to identify a great pizza, I’m sure. If things do not seem quite right, it could be the quality of your ingredients that’s the issue. No pizza can be better than what you put into it, after all.
Use the correct recipe, and think about what you’re trying to make. There are all sorts of pizzas out there, from thin New York style pizza to crispy, cracker-like Neapolitan, heavy Chicago deep-dish, and many more. If you’re using a recipe intended to make one sort, but you’re trying to produce another, you’re not going to end up with anything great. Consider what you like in a pizza, before you start cooking. It will help you end up with delicious pies, time and time again.
Finally – bake the pizza correctly. Don’t expect a pre-baked freezer pizza to be a good one, and never use a low-temperature oven to create anything else. High baking temperatures give pizza its characteristic flavor and texture. Does that mean you have to rig your oven to bake at 900 degrees? Not at all! Use the highest setting on your oven (ideally a wood or gas oven), or purchase a countertop pizza oven that will produce the ideal temperature and texture every time. These devices are consistent in making tasty pizza, and can produce excellent pizza in half the time even if they take up a bit of space.
You do not have to go overboard, but it may take a bit of work to make good pizza at home. You will never be stuck with lousy homemade pizza again. Just get the right ingredients, a good recipe, and use the correct baking method!