Easily Improve Store-Bought Pizza Dough With An Effortless Technique

After the wheel, store-bought pizza dough is probably the second-best invention ever. Easy to buy and just about as easy to bake up, there are endless, crowd-pleasing dishes you can make – not just pizza – with pizza dough. Even though store-bought pizza dough is instantly upgraded once you bake it up with a rich, tomatoey sauce blanketed under mounds of gooey cheese and your favorite toppings, we discovered an effortless way to improve the quality of your dough before it even hits the pizza pan — and it comes from pizza enthusiast Andris Lagsdin and his food blog, Baking Steel.

According to Lagsdin, if you roll your store-bought pizza dough into balls first, you give it a chance to rest, develop gas, and turn into a more pliable, easy-to-work-with dough. In general, you should always take your store-bought pizza dough out of the packaging and let it rest at room temperature for three to four hours before stretching it for baking — otherwise, it'll be too cold and rigid, causing the dough to break and tear as you stretch it. By forming your dough into tight, taught balls, you give the yeast an added chance to ferment a bit more, creating bubbles that will bake up into crisp pockets of air, helping your dough cook quickly and distribute your flavors evenly. Just make sure to flour those tops and toss a towel over your dough so it doesn't dry out.

The beauty of store-bought pizza dough is that it's pretty difficult to mess up. When you're not making your own pizza dough, getting your dough to the right texture is of utmost importance. Once you've formed your balls by using plenty of flour and tucking the edges into the middle until you have a nice, tight evenly shaped sphere, all you need to do after is stretch it out, gently and firmly, then add your toppings and bake. One tip for elevating the crust of your store-bought pizza dough is brushing it with a layer of your preferred oil and sprinkling it with some garlic salt. This will help your crust crisp up to a golden brown color and add some complementary flavor to your sauce and toppings.

Another expert move is to par-bake your crust before adding the toppings — especially if you have a lot of ingredients that might add moisture during the bake; mushrooms, onions, bell peppers, sausage, and olives like you'd find on a supreme pizza, for example. To par-bake, all you need to do is pop your rolled-out dough into the hot 450-degree Fahrenheit oven and bake it until the top of the dough solidifies and the bottom of the dough is golden brown and crispy. This added structure will ensure you don't end up with a soggy, sloppy slice of pizza.