When pizza dough is too sticky?

The easiest way to fix a sticky pizza dough is to slowly and gently knead more flour into the dough. You should do this in small increments to ensure you do not add too much and cause the dough to become dry. Keep adding more flour until the dough turns less sticky and becomes a firm, smooth texture.

You have followed every single detail of your pizza recipe, mixed all ingredients in the right proportions, but when you start working on the dough, you notice it’s too sticky. And the first question that comes to your mind is, why is my pizza dough so sticky?

Well, there are several things that can make pizza dough sticky. The most common ones are excess hydration, too little kneading, using cold water, and environmental factors.

Luckily, there are a few things you can do to fix your sticky dough. Read on!

Before we discuss in detail some of the reasons that make pizza dough extra sticky and how to solve this problem, let’s first understand how good pizza dough should look or feel like.

Now, when you just start preparing your pizza dough, the dough is usually very wet and sticky before the ingredients mix well together. Over time, it absorbs the water and becomes less sticky.

How sticky your pizza dough should be will depend on how comfortably you can handle the wet dough. A stickier dough, however, has been found to produce better crusts. The excess steam produced when baking the pizza helps loosen up the crust, resulting in lighter, crispier pizzas.

But this much stickiness also means that handling the dough will be more difficult. You need to find out what works for you. Hydration of 66%, for instance, would be a great place to start.

But remember, different baking flours come with different water-handling abilities. So the most effective way to go about it is to try different variations and stick to the one that works best for you.

The number one reason for pizza dough stickiness is high hydration, which means there is too much water in the dough. Dough hydration is expressed as a percentage of the total amount of flour. 80% hydration, for example, could mean that there are 800 grams of water in 1000 grams of flour.

Generally, the higher this percentage is, the wetter and stickier the dough will be. Simply put, the more water the dough has, the stickier it will be. Of course, factors like how much water your type of flour can absorb also play a role in determining the dough’s stickiness.

Always aim for hydration of about 66%, as we mentioned earlier. If you go higher than this, your dough will start getting wetter and less manageable. Here is a video on how to calculate pizza dough hydration and basic baker percentages.

Another common reason you may end up with sticky pizza dough is not pounding your dough enough. When you knead the dough, gluten is developed, making the dough less sticky.

Kneading can take anywhere between 15 and 25 minutes. But the longer you do it, the more you are able to reduce the stickiness.

Gluten is an important protein in baking, as without it, rolling and stretching your dough can be close to impossible.

For proper gluten formation, it is important that you pick a flour that has high gluten content. Without enough gluten, the dough will become compact and will break every time you try to stretch it.

Pounding dough for an extended period of time allows the gluten to create networks that strengthen and stretch the dough more. As soon as you stop kneading, these networks become inactive.

Cold water is not good for dough processing. Cold water prevents gluten from developing properly, leaving the dough sticky and difficult to work with.

If you live in an area that experiences high humidity, the high content of moisture in the air will be absorbed by the dough and it may be difficult to keep the dough in the elasticity required to produce your desired results.

What this simply means is that pizza dough made in a dry environment will end up being different from dough made in a humid environment in terms of hydration. In humid areas, the dough will tend to be a little stickier than in dry areas.

Depending on the reason your dough is sticky, you may want to try a few tricks to get rid of the stickiness. In most instances, pizza dough gets sticky because the water content is higher than the flour content. So adding flour will help harden the dough.

Do not overdo it, though. Go slow, adding a pinch of flour at a time. As you do this, knead the dough thoroughly to make sure everything is mixing properly.

Keep adding the flour until the dough stops sticking both to your hands and the kneading surface. If the stickiness was caused by high water content, this should be able to solve the problem.

If you haven’t mixed your pizza dough well or long enough, you will need to do so to activate the gluten protein and reduce the stickiness. With continued pounding, the dough will become smooth and springy and will not stick to your hands any longer.

If you are preparing your dough in a humid environment, consider using less water than what is specified in your chosen recipe. Add the water a few spoons at a time until you achieve your preferred consistency.

The secret to obtaining tighter dough in a humid area is going slowly. Don’t add plenty of water in one go as this may raise the hydration to a level that may be difficult to bring down.

Always make sure you are using warm water when making pizza dough. It will help keep the gluten protein intact to prevent stickiness. Warm water will also activate and hydrate the yeast. When yeast is hydrated properly, it becomes active, allowing the gluten to develop and hold the ingredients together.

If you have used cold water from the word go, you may need to make your dough all over again. Adding flour may not get you the consistency your dough needs to hold everything together, and even if by good luck it does, the resulting pizza will likely be hard and chewy.

While sticky pizza dough may give you a hard time making crusts out of it, it undoubtedly produces the softest and fluffiest pizzas.

So, let’s say you still want to use your sticky dough as is. How do you handle it to make sure it doesn’t stick to your hands?

It’s simple; use a dough scraper.

A dough scraper gives you a sturdy edge so you can work your dough quickly without worrying about it sticking to your hands or work surface.

To get the best results, however, make sure the bowl you are using to mix the dough is oiled. Apply a thin layer of oil on the dough itself too. Dust some flour on the worktop as well or just smear some oil. It will help with the sticking.

If the dough is too sticky to pound, you may need to think outside the box and try other strategies. One of the most effective tactics here would be the ‘pincer’ method. Ideally, you will be using your thumb and index finger to pinch and cut through the dough.

The pincer method will help you get to the center of the dough easily so you can mix in all the flour. You can dip your hand in a bowl of water first; it will keep the dough from sticking to the hand.

Another technique you could use to work your sticky dough is the ‘stretch and fold’ method. For this technique, you will use your fingertips and the heel of your hand.

Simply grab an edge of the dough and pull it away from you. Then bring it to the center of the dough and use the heel of your hand to press it in. Do not touch the dough with your palms or you will get the dough sticking to your hands.

Repeat this a couple of times, rotating the dough as you go. After you have made several folds, use a scraper to pick up the dough from the worktop. Spray a little oil on it and repeat.

The continued stretching and folding help develop gluten, and the dough actually gets a little tighter and more manageable.

There are many reasons your pizza dough may end up being stickier than you initially intended. It could be that you added too much water, you haven’t kneaded the dough enough, you used cold water, or your kitchen is just humid.

Adding flour to the dough can help reduce the stickiness. To prevent this from happening again, however, make sure you are using warm water and the right amount of it and the dough is mixed properly.

Have you had trouble with sticky pizza dough? Tell us below what you did to make it tighter.

Ancient Romans and Greeks were known to eat flatbreads which were baked and then topped with spices and olive oil. This is now referred to as focaccia bread. In some respects, this could be seen as a very early form of pizza, in that they are both a topped bread product.

During the Byzantine period, in around 997 AD, the word pizza was noted in a Latin document. This is widely believed to be the oldest written reference to the word pizza. The document is nearly 1,022 years old and was written in the Italian town of Gaeta. In it, the local bishop is promised 12 pizzas as a form of yearly homage from the son of a feudal lord.

There were many Italian street vendors in the 19th century selling foods. One popular street snack was a flatbread with toppings. This again could be seen as a very rustic type of pizza.

The first pizza pie resembling modern-day pizza is believed to have been invented by a baker known as Raffaele Esposito from Naples. This is widely believed to have happened in around 1889 when the Italian King Umberto I and his wife, Queen Margherita, visited Naples. Here, they requested Esposito make them a pizza which he did.

The pizza was topped with tomato, basil, and mozzarella cheese. To this day, this pizza is still referred to as a margherita. It is believed that the Italian immigrants moving across Europe brought the idea and recipe for pizza to the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and the United States.

When soldiers returned to the States from the European trenches in WWII, pizza began to grow in popularity. The first pizzeria in the United States was opened by a man known as Gennaro Lombardi in 1905.

The pizzeria was located on 53 ⅓ Spring Street in New York City. The restaurant is still open today and still cooks all of the pizzas in the original oven! They have moved location to 32 Spring Street and have opened a second outlet at 290 Eighth Avenue.

Sticky pizza dough is almost always caused by a dough that has had too much liquid added and has become over hydrated.

Some people prefer to use a higher hydration percentage for their pizza dough as they believe this will result in a lighter base. This is true, and many people try to get their dough hydration level above 60% as a result.

The issue with this is that it can make your dough very sticky and harder to work with. It is very hard to stretch out a sticky dough thin enough for a good base. If the dough is left too thick on the base, you can end up with a very doughy and cloying pizza.

A sticky dough may need large amounts of flour to roll out correctly. This can create a thick crust of flour on the exterior of the dough. Flour burns easily, and so if you use too much to roll out your dough it can burn.

Dough hydration refers to the volume of water contained in the dough relative to the volume of flour. This means that a 60% hydration dough with say 100g of flour will contain approximately 60g of water.

This depends on the type of flour that you are using. The most common flour types are strong white bread flour and 00 flour. For 00 flour we suggest using a hydration percentile of between 56 and 58%. For strong white bread flour, we suggest a slightly higher ratio of 58 to 60%.

Higher hydration levels in pizza dough can cause a variance in the crust texture. Lighter, crispier crusts are typically formed with a hydration level of between 65 and 70%. This will result in a stickier dough. The additional moisture will create extra steam in the oven, and this will mean that there are larger air pockets in the crust, making it lighter.

If you have made pizza dough a lot successfully, you can begin to play around with the hydration levels. This can result in unpleasant results if you misjudge the ratios of ingredients. We suggest sticking to the ratios above if you are a novice pizza maker.

You may be using the wrong type of flour. Different flours will absorb different quantities of water. This is even apparent between different manufacturers of the same type of flour.

There will always be a little aspect of trial and error when switching up the flour that you are using, but do not let this dissuade you from experimenting.

The humidity of your baking environment will also play a role in how your flour reacts to create a dough. If the air is particularly humid, the flour will take in some moisture from the environment, making the dough stickier. Therefore, experimenting with the climate of your kitchen can also play into how your pizza dough turns out.

If you have realized that you are making dough in humid conditions, reduce the volume of water that you add to the dough. We would advise adding the water a tablespoon or less at a time.

This will help you to monitor the hydration levels of the dough much more accurately and reduce the likelihood of you over-hydrating it. You can always add more water, but you can’t take it out.

Altitude also has an impact on how your pizza dough reacts. High altitudes cause the yeast to activate faster and the dough to become drier. At lower altitudes (i.e. closer to the sea level), your pizza dough will be more likely to be wetter.

Another major reason that pizza dough becomes sticky is due to a lack of kneading. Kneading is what forms the gluten protein strands inside the dough, giving it structure and stability. This also helps to make the dough smooth and elastic in texture.

If you are kneading your dough by hand, be aware that it will take a while. A good rule of thumb is kneading for anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes. The longer you knead the dough, the less sticky it will become.

Strangely, if you do not rehydrate your yeast correctly this can also result in a sticky dough. Active dry yeast needs to be rehydrated with warm water to activate it correctly and cause it to bloom.

If you use cold water to do this, then the gluten-containing structure in the yeast (the glutathione) can seep out of the yeast cells. This can cause the dough to become sticky as a result.

00 flour is also known as Italian-style flour. It is made from the hardest wheat with the highest protein content. It is commonly used to make pasta due to the high gluten content.

Gluten is the protein found in most flours which gives the dough its stretch and malleability. The protein content of this flour is somewhere between 11 and 12% depending on the manufacturer. 00 flour is incredibly fine in texture which makes it very easy to roll super thin without tearing.

Strong bread flour tends to be made from hard spring wheat. This too has a high protein content of between 10 and 13%. The high gluten content of the flour makes it ideal for use in yeasted recipes.

This is because the gluten helps to retain the structure of the bread as the yeast causes it to expand. Bread flour is preferred to plain flour as it gives your dough a better rise and a chewier texture.

The easiest way to fix a sticky pizza dough is to slowly and gently knead more flour into the dough. You should do this in small increments to ensure you do not add too much and cause the dough to become dry.

Keep adding more flour until the dough turns less sticky and becomes a firm, smooth texture. You should leave your dough to rest for 30 minutes before shaping. If it still appears sticky, place the dough in a bowl and cover it completely with a thin layer of flour on all sides.

If the dough is sticky because it is underworked, simply knead it for longer. If it begins to become smooth and spongy as you do this, this is the solution.

If your dough is sticky because you used cold water there is no solution except for starting over. There is no way to rectify the dough if the glutathione has seeped out and so your best bet is to scrap the dough and have another go.

If your dough is a little sticky as you are trying to shape the pizza, you can add a mixture of flour and cornmeal or flour and semolina to your surface and your dough. This will help to absorb some of the moisture from the dough and prevent it from sticking to the surface.

If your pizza dough has been sat in the refrigerator it is more susceptible to becoming sticky when taken out and handled. To reduce the chances of this happening, you should allow your chilled pizza dough to reach room temperature before you begin to handle and shape it.

If you have intended to make a dough with a stickier consistency it will be more difficult to work with. This does not mean it is wrong, but there are steps you can take to make this easier.

Kneading a sticky dough is very hard, but it can be made easier with the use of a dough scraper. This will help to unstick it from the bowl, the work surfaces, and your hands.

If you are still struggling, we recommend covering your hands with some water. This will prevent the dough from sticking to your hands as much and make your life easier.

If your dough is still sticky after you have kneaded it sufficiently, you can add a little oil to the bowl. Return the dough to the bowl and leave it to one side to rest and rise. This will guarantee that the dough will not get stuck to the bowl and be difficult to get out. If you forget to do this step and the dough appears stuck, scrap the inside of the bowl with a dough scraper to easily release.

If you wish to cook a sticky dough it is vital to cover the peel with plenty of semolina before placing the dough on top. You should barely be able to see the peel underneath the semolina as a lot will come off as you slide the pizza onto the pizza stone.

Another good idea when working with a sticky dough is to preheat the oven and the pizza stone to at least 450 or 500 degrees Fahrenheit. This should be done a minimum of 30 minutes before you intend to cook the pizza to allow them to heat up correctly, evenly, and completely.