The first couple of times you attempt to make your homemade pizza, you might discover that it’s not as easy as you thought. Because making a quality pizza involves baking, you’ll need to understand how to measure things correctly, along with a few other baking tips to ensure that you get the best product every time. Here are the most common pizza-making mistakes and how to avoid them.

Resting the Dough

An essential component to making pizza is proofing your dough. Pizza is bread, and just like most other bread, it must be proofed with yeast to help lessen the density of the dough.

This will make it light and flaky when you cook it. Then, when it comes time to eat, the bread will pull apart easily instead of remaining chewy.

Kneading the Dough

There is a delicate balance between bread and pizza dough. You want to knead it until you have a good consistency with the dough. I want it to becomes elastic, but you don’t want to over-knead your bread. This could ruin you hard work because you will make it dense.

As the yeast expands, it pulls on the bread fibers and spreads the dough to form better gluten bonds, making it sticky and elastic. If you over knead with your hands or a roller, you will destroy the aerations that the yeast worked so hard to provide. You’ll have a tough pizza that wont bubble and rise. For this reason, you should also never use a rolling pin, but you can substitute it with a pizza press machine.

Too Many Toppings

Less is more with pizza. When you’re adding your toppings, you don’t want too much of any one thing because it will overwhelm the final product and it cancel out other flavors. It may also make it difficult to finish cooking your pizza.

Cooking Procedure

With pizza, you want to achieve a final product fast. If you constructed it correctly, there should be a thin dough sheet with light or medium toppings and a roaring hot oven. The hotter the oven, the faster the cooking time.

The best way to determine if it’s cooked is to watch it. For an oven that maxes out at 500 degrees Fahrenheit, as most conventional ovens do, this will take approximately 10 minutes. You must watch the pizza and turn it along the way to prevent it from burning. You may want to cook it for a whole minute or less with a brick oven. You’ll know when it’s finished based on experience and how well it crusts over without burning.

These have been the most common pizza-making mistakes and how to avoid them. Learn from here to make the best pizzas.