We used to not have this problem until we switched to General Mills Superlative flour. Our previous flour was of the same protein content and the recipe is the same except that we use more water as Superlative seems to absorb more water.
We use raw sausage and more grease from it is pooling on top of pizzas now.
Mushrooms on a pizza is giving us a lot of water. Sausage and mushroom pizzas really result in big pools of water/grease.
Ham and Pineapple gives us a big water pool.
A pizza we do with salami and ham really pools up.
We use a lot of pepperoni and have always dampened off the grease with paper towels but now we are taking pizzas and tipping them sideways to drain off all the extra liquid before slicing.
If we don’t take enough care people are winding up with soggy pizzas by the time they are getting home or receiving delivery.
Our baking times are anywhere from 10 to 13 minutes – cheese to a veggie or hawaiin – thick crust pizza. I can’t imagine increasing the baking times any more than that as its long enough as it is. We do not add water to the sauce.
I’m really perplexed right now as to what to try to improve things.
Excessive oiling out of the pepperoni and/or sausage can be the result of a different formulation (of the meat product) which includes more fat. For example, lean, bison pepperoni just doesn’t oil out, where as a cheap, low cost pepperoni could fuel a diesel truck. The fact that you are also experiencing problems with the veggies watering out, leads me to think something at the oven has changed. Trust me…it ain’t the flour. Have you checked/confirmed your baking temperature recently to make sure you are still baking at the temperature you think you are?
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
Tom is definately right, another factor that happened to us was the age of our cheese. I called the manufacturer when we were trying to figure out the problems and they had said that with their cheese, if it had not aged enough, it would also cause water problems.
Any produce has water in it and can release the moisture as it cooks, and if there’s alot of veggies, it can be very wet. I’m sure there can be other causes as well, these are what we noticed with our product.
i have been told that deck ovens sweat the mostiure out of the product, i used to have soggy pizzas at my old place unitl i got a forced air oven because i guess they dry the toppings out from the outside in, not inside out like a deck oven
but if you did not have the problem before i would lean towards the flour
Have not tested the exact temperature but it should be about 525 as what our oven shows has historically been correct. We are real happy with the bake as the crust is baking really well. The flour we were using before was by Benerie (sp?). I posted on the TT before to see if anyone had heard of it but did not get a response. I never could find any info on it either and it took weeks for my sales rep to get me any answers either. Supposedly the flour was around 12.5%. When we switched flour we had to increase the yeast and water to get our crust to come out right. If we did not put the extra water in the mixer would just shut down after a while.
I wonder if this is the issue. We did switch cheeses around the same time we changed flours. We are really happy with the quality of the low moisture whole milk mozzarella we are using now. It flows well, does not burn to early, reheats well for slices and a great taste. I just went to check the manufactured date but the code on the bars does not reveal a date.
Its an old rotating rack oven – Gardner, I think. Had someone locally speculate its a damper issue but that has been frozen/jammed in place for years. Hard to figure what could be going wrong in the oven as there is not much to it.