Complains about raw dough

Pizza Shop Talk The Think Tank
1

We’ve been in business for close to a year now and are still battling the same problem. At least three or four times a week we have customers complaining about their pizzas being undercooked.

Sometimes this is the whole middle (crust) of the pizza and other times just smaller spots in random places.

We use a Doyon Piz6 gas oven (jet air) from wood paddle directly to the decks. We corrected our dough recipe in the summer which seems to have helped stop it somewhat but again, the complaints do still come in.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to correct this type of issue?

I plan on going to the show in Vegas this March.

Thanks!

John

2

More question than answers at this point. What time and temperature are you baking at? What dough weight/pizza size? What model oven are you using? Does this problem tend to happen with a certain type of pizza-e.g., veggie, cheese, etc or does it happen on all pizza types from time to time? How are you stretching the dough?

3

Is it really undercooked dough or gum line that makes it look uncooked?
Try basting your base with a light covering of oil before saucing, cheesing and topping, especially if you are having this problem on heavily topped pizzas or those with a lot of fresh vegies.
Often customers see the gum line and say it is undercooked or “raw” when it is infact trapped moisture on the top of the dough skin.
Dave

4

The other posts are on point but if the issue really is undercooked here are a couple of other thoughts:

  1. If the problem happens only in one size of pie you need to look at whether your doughball size for that size pizza is consistent with what you are doing elsewhere. For example: If your cook time/temp setup is right for a 16" pie with a 25oz dough ball and you use that same setup to make a 12" pie with a 16oz doughball you might end up with an undercooked pie. (oz of divided by the area of the pizza will give you a good quick look at how the sizes compare to each other) (Oz/(3.14 X Radius squared))

  2. An oven running too hot with a shortened cook time can result in undercooked pies in the center. Solution: lower the temp and increase cook time. I see a lot of posts about 5 minute cook times. In my experience, with our dough balls and ovens, 7 minutes is the ideal time. I had a manager who was trying to reduce “door time” by raising temps and saving 2 minutes in the ovens and we had this problem.

You need to find the right temp/time for your recipe and ovens and make sure your doughballs are roughly equivalent to each other for their respective sizes.