No one likes an undercooked pizza dough as it just does not have the texture that you are used to tasting in a pizza.
So here we will be talking all about undercooked pizza dough and how do you fix undercooked pizza dough.
Pizza is one of the best foods that you can get whenever you are hungry.
It is easy to cook, delicious, and it can be as healthy as you want it to be depending on the ingredients you use.
There are many parts to a pizza with each one being equally as delicious and important as the other.
You need to perfect all the parts and know how do you fix undercooked pizza dough in case you ever face the situation.
The pizza sauce needs to combine the other ingredients for the toppings and the toppings should have a pleasing taste to get the iconic flavors you want on the pizza you have.
However, some would say that the crust is the most important part of the pizza, and I would have to agree.
It is the part that holds the entire pizza together and it should be crispy as well.
It is easy to mess up the pizza crust from the preparation alone, especially in the cooking process.
So here are the reasons why you have undercooked pizza dough and how to fix it.
Is It Safe To Eat Undercooked Pizza Dough?
While pizzas are relatively softer than the classic crispy pizza crusts, eating undercooked pizza dough is not safe. You need to make sure that the crust is cooked well and safe to eat.
Undercooked pizza dough is dangerous, to say the least since it has many bacteria in it.
The flour used in dough does not cook as it is just grains milled finely to create the flour.
That means that there is a high possibility that uncooked pizza dough has many bacteria that will harm you. Eating undercooked pizza dough can be a huge health risk.
If pizza dough is not cooked through, it can be fatal as some of the common bacteria in flour is Escherichia or E. coli.
While E. coli naturally exists in the lower intestines of warm-blooded animals, it can affect your health drastically when you come into contact with it in other ways and will mess up your digestion.
There is also salmonella found in the raw dough so it does not come solely from animals. You can also get this after eating undercooked pizza dough.
That means that you need to kill these contaminants before saying that the dough is safe.
The grains used for the flour in the dough grow in dirty soil to get these contaminants.
E .coli is common because of the manure used as fertilizers in fields for grains.
The germs that get into the flour are from the fields and during the processing period.
Many contaminants can get into the flour when it is milled or ground and even after you cook at lower temperatures making the pizza dough not cooked through.
The grains are milled, ground, and bleached but these processes do not remove the bacteria in the flour. You should avoid eating undercooked pizza dough and make sure to fix it before consuming it.
That is why you still need to cook it right to kill all the contaminants in the flour. Pizza dough not cooked through can still contain these contaminants as well.
So if your pizza dough is undercooked, make sure to leave it on the side and try to fix it before you eat it.
We have a guide on how do you fix undercooked pizza dough, so make sure that you read to the end of the post.
How Can You Tell If Pizza Dough Is Undercooked?
There are several ways to see if the pizza dough is cooked or not and it does not have to come to eating undercooked pizza dough before you figure out that the dough has gone bad.
You need to make sure that it cooks to be safe to eat and remove that soggy texture on the crust. It can be challenging how to tell if pizza dough is undercooked.
First, you can see if the dough is undercooked. If you look at the bottom of the pizza and the crust looks like apale white base, then it is probably undercooked and unsafe to eat.
The browning on a pizza crust is the best sign to make sure that your pizza crust is not only crispy but will also be safe to eat and will have all the flavors that you want to taste.
If a pizza crust is undercooked, the bottom of the crust will not have any brown colors. This is one easy way how to tell if pizza dough is undercooked.
Instead, it will have this sort of wet and greasy white dough that is not as hot as you would like it to be.
Another way to determine if the pizza is undercooked is to tap on the bottom of the pizza.
Use your finger and then tap the crust of the pizza, if it has a loud solid thud, then it is undercooked. Knowing how to tell if pizza dough is undercooked can avoid a lof of stomach ache.
What you are looking for is a sound that almost transfers into the pizza dough.
That means that there is only air and cooked dough inside the crust and the outer parts of the dough are crispy.
While these techniques are easy to do, they are not as reliable as testing the crust with a meat probe.
This is the most accurate way to see if the pizza crust is cooked or undercooked.
Insert a meat probe into the pizza and see if it reads around 190 to 195 degrees Fahrenheit.
If it does, then the pizza crust has been cooked. You can now test it again with the other techniques.
In case it has been cooked but the pizza dough is still raw, can you rebake undercooked pizza dough? We will see below.
Reasons For Undercooked Pizza Dough
Now you might have seen that your pizza dough is undercooked and you need to know where you went wrong so it would not happen to your next pizza. Here are the common reasons for that.
Undercooked pizza dough causes stomach aches so you need to know the reasons, signs, and ways to fix it.
Low Baking Temperature
Note that pizza tastes amazing when you cook them at very high temperatures.
You would not cook other recipes such as burgers and steaks at this temperature as it will only burn the outer parts and leave them raw in the middle.
Pizza, especially Neapolitan pizza cooks at temperatures of at least 950 degrees Fahrenheit.
The reason behind this is to cook the pizza quickly and get that crispy crust under it.
Cooking pizzas at high temperatures is necessary so that the moisture on the dough immediately evaporates giving you anice crispy crust, and the dough, and the toppings will cook.
So one of the main reasons the pizza you cook is undercooked is that your baking temperature might be too low.
In that case, you will need to cook the pizza longer.
I would also advise you to use a pizza stone when cooking pizzas.
One of the most important things to do when cooking pizzas is to make sure that the cooking surface of the pizza is truly hot.
Short Baking Timer
If you cook pizzas, you should know that they finish cooking in just 60 or 90 seconds.
If you have the right temperature and thickness on the crust and toppings that you use on the pizza.
At 950-1000 degrees Fahrenheit, a thin-crust pizza will finish cooking in just 90 seconds.
However, you will not attain the same finish on the same timer at different temperatures.
You need to bake the pizza longer if you have a lower cooking temperature.
This will not make the crispiest crusts, but your pizza dough will not come out of the oven undercooked.
Thick Dough And Toppings
When cooking steaks, salmon, burgers, and other cuts of meat, the weight does not matter as much as the thickness.
The same goes with the pizza, the dough, and the toppings on it.
Even when you are making large pizzas, you need to make sure that the pizza dough is thin enough to cook in a short amount of time. You will also need to do this with the pizza toppings.
The pizza toppings affect the weight of the pizza a lot.
That means that they weigh down on the crust so make sure that they are also thin enough to be cooked as quickly as the crust.
How Do You Fix Undercooked Pizza Dough?
Luckily for you, there is still something that you can do to make the undercooked pizza safe to eat. You can easily know how do you fix undercooked pizza dough by using the following pointers as your guide.
This is where we will also answer whether can you rebake undercooked pizza dough or not.
Cook With A Hot Bottom
One way to fix your undercooked pizza dough is to cook it again on a pizza stone or pizza steel.
Pizza stones absorb and release heat from the oven to cook pizzas evenly. It is most certain that the answer to whether can you rebake undercooked pizza dough is a yes.
Since they absorb a lot of heat, they will cook the pizza quickly and make the crust crispy.
This will also equally heat the toppings and cook your pizza toppings evenly.
Close To Fire
If you do not have a pizza stone available, you might want to cook the pizza again another way.
If you have a grill, you can place the pizza on a pan and then cook it on the grill.
If the oven is the only appliance available, you need to keep the pizza dough as close to the burner as possible. That way, it cooks even further without affecting the toppings too much.
So can you rebake undercooked pizza dough? You absolutely can to make sure that it is safe to eat.
Thinner Pizzas Are Better
Aside from it being healthier, thinner pizzas are also easier to cook.
They cook quickly so you might want to make pizzas thinner than what you are used to cooking.
You will also need to make sure that you thinly slice the pizza toppings to not weigh down on the dough.
You will have a much better result when you have thinner pizzas. This is a risky way of whether can you rebake undercooked pizza dough since cooking undercooked pizza dough can burn thin crusts.
Hope this post on how to fix undercooked pizza dough helps you out! If you have any more information you would like to share leave it in the comments below!
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