You’ve got puffy crusted Neapolitan pizzas down to a fine art and your deep dish Detroit style pizzas draw admiring gazes over the fence from the neighbours, but what about a thinner, crispier pizza? We got Gozney development chef Joe Boiling to shed a bit more light on how to master those thin, cracker crusts...
If you’re looking to learn how to make thin crust pizza, I’m going to go ahead and assume that you’re also going to want a crispy pizza (and if I’ve assumed incorrectly that’s cool. As below you’ll learn to understand how and what to do to make your pizza crispy but not thin… or thin and not crispy...you get the idea.)
In truth, a ‘thin crust pizza dough recipe’ can be any dough recipe you roll out thinly (we’ll talk about rolling pins later. Sorry Neapolitans) but a thin AND crispy pizza base, the type that cracks and shatters wonderfully in your mouth but still retains just the right amount of chew? Well, that’s a different thing altogether.
Our sourdough thin and crispy pizza recipe is a perfect balance of crispiness and thinness that uses a long ferment to pack in bags of flavour to a seriously thin and crispy pizza. But if you want to learn how to make any pizza you bake that bit crispier or bit thinner then read on.
How to make a crispy pizza.
Let's start with crispiness. The relationship between heat and crispiness is a bit strange as far as pizza is concerned. Common cooking wisdom tells us that if something is hotter, it’ll generally get crispier (a fried egg, oven baked pastry etc) but once we reach the crazy temperatures achieved in Gozney pizza ovens things change a little.
If you cook a 60 second Neapolitan pizza at 500℃ it’s soft, right? Puffy, soft, bouncy crusts are kind of what you’re looking for - and why it’s often referred to as a ‘knife and fork’ pizza in some quarters! When we’re baking pizza in 60-90 seconds of course it’s not crispy - it hasn’t had long enough to even think about getting crispy!
To achieve crispiness we actually need the oven to be cooler, allowing our pizza to remain in the pizza oven for a longer period of time and therefore become crispy.
So a simple dough recipe or almost any dough recipe will naturally get crispier by being baked at a slightly low temperature, for a little longer. You can experiment with this easily with any of the Gozney gas ovens at twist of a dial but it takes a bit more practice with solid fuels.
How to make a thin crust pizza
If you’re a Neapolitan purist what I’m about to type might upset you… get a rolling pin. A uniform thickness is best achieved with the aid of a big hunk of material shaped into a cylinder - it’ll really help. Besides, this isn’t going to be a Neapolitan pizza, it’s a thin and crispy pizza, so it’s definitely allowed.
While any dough recipe can be rolled out to make a thinner base using a rolling pi, just bear in mind you might want to drop the weight of your regular dough balls to make it easy to roll out thinly.
I like to use semolina mixed with flour (50/50) to open pizzas that I want to be thin and/or crispy as this makes rolling easier as well as adding to the crunch on the finished pizza.
So a thin crust pizza is as simple as understanding your oven temperature and rolling out some dough as thin as possible and topping with homemade pizza sauce (and that will no doubt be delicious!). But if you want that thin, crispy, mildly chewy flavour packed cracker crust, you’re definitely going to want to follow the recipe.
