Most pizza troubleshooting advice is a list of possible causes presented as equals. That leaves you testing the rare one first, changing three things at once, and ending up no better informed after five bakes than you were after one.
This page works differently. Find the symptom you are actually seeing, read the causes in order of how likely they are in a home setup, and run the test that tells you which one is yours. Every cause here has a test, because a cause without a test is a guess.
Before you change anything
Change one variable at a time. This is the entire method. If you raise hydration, extend the ferment, and move the oven rack in the same bake, you learn nothing from the result. It might be better. You will not know why.
Write down what you changed. Six or more variables move between bakes without you touching them: dough temperature, kitchen temperature, flour lot, yeast or starter vigour, oven recovery, and how long the dough sat on the peel. Memory reconstructs about two of them accurately. A record turns unrelated attempts into a comparison.
The fields worth capturing are in how to log a bake, and they are short enough to copy onto a sheet by the bench if that suits you better than a phone.
Work in process order. Dough problems come before bake problems. Fixing the bake will not repair dough that never developed, but fixing the dough sometimes resolves what looked like a bake fault.
Find your symptom
| What you are seeing | Most likely causes, in order | Go to |
|---|---|---|
| Dense, raw band under the sauce | Bottom heat, hydration beyond what the bake can drive off, moisture load, bake too short at too high a top temperature, under-fermented dough | The gum line |
| Pale, floppy base | Surface not actually at temperature, wrong surface for the oven, no recovery between bakes, contact broken by excess dusting flour | Pale and floppy base |
| Rim scorched, middle raw | Deck and dome temperatures out of balance | Burnt rim, raw middle |
| Dough springs back or tears when opening | Dough too cold, insufficient rest after balling, gluten over- or under-developed | Dough won't stretch |
| Pizza sticks to the peel or folds on launch | Dwell time on the peel, wrong or insufficient dusting, launch motion | Launch failures |
| Dough slack, sticky, no structure | Over-fermented, or warmer through the schedule than you thought | Over-proofed dough |
| Vegetable pizza soggy on top | Water released faster than the bake can remove it | Wet vegetables |
| No leopard spotting on the rim | Usually a bake profile your oven cannot produce, not a fault | Leoparding explained |
The three symptoms people misdiagnose most
A dense band under the sauce
Almost everyone is told this means too much sauce. In a typical home setup, that is near the bottom of the list.
The band forms at the interface between dough and sauce because that is where moisture and heat meet. If the base is not receiving enough heat from underneath, or the bake ends before the moisture has been driven off, the layer stays dense while the top of the pizza looks finished.
The distinguishing question is whether the base underneath the band is properly coloured and set. If it is not, this is a heat problem and reducing your sauce will change very little.
A pale base
This is a heat transfer chain, and each link can be tested separately: is the surface at temperature, is it the right surface for this oven, has it recovered from the previous pizza, and is contact being broken by a layer of dusting flour.
Notice that three of those four are free to fix. Preheat for longer, allow recovery time, use less flour on the peel. It is worth exhausting those before buying anything, because a steel bought to fix a preheat problem will disappoint you.
A rim that burns before the middle is done
The oven has two temperatures doing two different jobs. The surface sets the base by contact. The air and upper surfaces cook the top. When those are out of balance, the thickest, most exposed part of the pizza scorches while the centre is still catching up.
The instinct is to lower everything. That usually produces a worse pizza, because you lose the base set as well. The fix is to rebalance the two rather than to reduce both, which is covered in deck temperature versus dome temperature.
Symptoms that are not faults
Some of what people try to fix is not a defect at all.
A domestic oven will not produce the char pattern associated with very hot, very fast bakes, and chasing it will mostly result in a burnt rim. That pattern is a signature of a specific bake profile rather than a general quality marker, and treating it as one leads people to ruin perfectly good pizza. See leoparding explained.
Similarly, a tight, even crumb is correct for several styles. If you are making a style built around structure and crispness and you have been told your crumb should be open and irregular, you have been given advice for a different pizza.
Where a result is a limit of your equipment rather than an error, the honest answer is to say so and point you at a style your equipment can actually deliver. That is what which style should you learn first is for.
When two things are wrong at once
This is common and it is not a reason to give up. Fix the one earliest in the process.
Under-fermented dough with a pale base is two problems, but the fermentation problem is upstream. Correct that first, because under-fermented dough will still give you a poor result even in a well-set-up oven, whereas a properly fermented dough sometimes bakes acceptably in a mediocre one.
The rough order of precedence:
- Dough development and fermentation
- Dough temperature and schedule
- Shaping and handling
- Bake surface and heat
- Topping load and moisture
When nothing here matches
Record the bake in as much detail as you can manage, including the things that seem irrelevant. Flour brand and lot, the temperature of the dough when you stopped mixing, the temperature of the room through the ferment, what the surface actually measured rather than what the dial said, and how long the pizza sat dressed on the peel.
Then tell us. Symptoms we cannot explain are the most useful messages we get, and they are how this hub improves.
In Plain English
This is a symptom-first diagnostic for pizza faults. You identify what you are actually seeing, work through the causes in order of likelihood, and run a test that confirms or rules out each one before you change anything.
It is for anyone whose pizza is nearly right and who cannot identify which variable is spoiling it, and for people who have been given four contradictory explanations for the same defect.
Use it straight after a bake, while the conditions are still fresh, and before you change your recipe or buy equipment. The governing rule is to change one variable at a time and write down what you changed, because a fault you cannot reproduce is a fault you cannot fix.
Next step: match your symptom in the table above, read the linked diagnosis, and run the test it gives you before adjusting anything.
Where to go next
The diagnostics in this cluster each take one symptom and go deeper:
- The gum line: five causes of a raw layer under your sauce
- Why your pizza base is pale and floppy
- Burnt rim, raw middle
- Why your pizza dough won't stretch
- Leoparding: what causes it and whether you should want it
If the problem turns out to be upstream of the bake, the four numbers that decide your crust covers the dough-side variables in order.