Help with cheese not melting with certian toppings.

Hey all,
I just started using Screens on my Stone deck oven… extremely easy to use and a lot less waste so far, but i seem to be having a problem now…

When cooking the pizzas with Peperoni and/or Sausage the cheese and everything turns out great…

however when I put Mushrooms/Onion/Green Pepper on a pizza the Cheese melts but not completly (you can still see a lot of unmelted shreds of cheese)

If i cook it longer the crust will burn on the edges before the cheese melts though.

I tried lowering the temp of the oven and cooking longer but that dosent seem to help it either.

I’ve also cut my sugar contect in my crust in 1/2 hopeing it would take longer to burn so the cheese would melt… it did’nt help.

Thoughts/ideas?

Thanks all!

I;
You say that you lowered your bake temperature. By how much, and to what temperature? You also say that tyou reduced the sugar level to half of what it was. How much flour are you using in your dough formula, and how much sugar are you adding? What amount didi you reduce the sugar to? I think what is happening is that you are not getting sufficient heat penetration into the crust and up into the toppings (pizza is baked from the bottom up) and this results in partially melted cheese when you have a lot of vegetable toppings on the pizza. They release steam during baking which cools the top of the pizza, effectively slowing or even preventing the melting of the cheese. Try baking a pizza right on the deck to see what happens. Your baking temperature might be too high. A good, typical deck baking temperature is about 525F, and a good sugat content is from 0 to 2% of the flour weight.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor

Tossing one or two of the veggies below the cheese also helps with the cheese browning.

Tom,
When I used the Stone Deck oven by sliding the pizza off the peel and directly onto the stone, I cooked at 500… anything higher would burn the crust. (Sugar was at 2%)

I switched over to screens on the Deck oven and raised my Temp. to 525 (my testing basicaly only included a Pepperoni topped pizzas)… once i recieved all my screens and started doing customer orders with veggies i noticed the cheese not thoughly cooking… i then reduced the Temp back down to 500… tested, still does the same… i then cut my sugar in the crust to 1%… still seems to be burning before the cheese melts.

Thougts?

Scott, I never though of that one however i’m known in the area for being the only one to put the toppings “on top” of the cheese… which is why i’m trying to steer clear of that but if that solves the problem i don’t think i’ll have a choice :?

Thanks!

Scott stole my thunder; and, make sure your veggies are as dry as possible. Let 'em sit in a collander for a while, after rinsing with ice water. Shake the strainer while they’re sitting, to get all the water possible out of there.

Given your tries at remedy, it seems it’s not your dough causing the problem.

let us know what works!

Try either starting the pizzas or finishing the pizza off of the screen.

I;
Boy…that sure sounds like an excessively hot oven to me, unless you have something like milk and/or eggs in the dough formula. I can see where 2% sugar might give you a bit of a burning problem is a deck oven when baking right on the deck, but at only 1% you should not have that problem. Just to confirm, you are not using a frozen cheese and adding it to the pizza without thoroughly thawing it…right? When we do a New York style pizza we normally don’t add any sugar to the dough formula. This allows us to give the pizza the maximum bake to get those desirable burnt spots on the bottom of the crust without burning the entire crust of making a “pizza bone” out of the crust erges.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor