Prevent Soggy French Bread Pizza With One Simple Tip

From a humble food-truck bite to a mass-produced TV-dinner favorite that you can even buy online (hello Stouffer's), French bread pizza has been a popular homemade treat since the 1970s. Even if you don't have frozen French bread pizza to pop into the oven at a moment's notice, scratch-made French bread pizza is easy and quick to prepare.

A French loaf (which is shorter and broader than a traditional French baguette) is the ideal bread type for these tasty pizza-style treats because it will crisp up beautifully into the perfect crunchy crust. Unfortunately, sauce and toppings can sabotage that crispy contrast you seek. The best way to prevent soggy French bread pizza is a double-baking approach. While we advocate the extra step of toasting the bread before baking the pizza with all the added sauces and toppings, toasted bread still risks becoming oversaturated with sauce. Consequently, there's a simple tip to tack onto this step: Toast the bread with a layer of cheese over it. If you add a thin layer of cheese to the bread before toasting it, the melted cheese will create a tasty barrier that the sauce won't penetrate.

After toasting the cheesy bread, you can then slather on the sauce, more cheese, and toppings before placing the pizza bread back into the oven for its second bake. If you still want a bit of sauce to soak into the crumb, you can use shredded or thinly shaved cheese in a patchy layer. Exposed parts of the crumb not topped with cheese can thus absorb a little bit of sauce.

French bread pizza can be as simple or complex as you wish. But if you're planning to pile on the toppings, you can hollow out the bread to make room. Simply pinch out the center crumb of each vertically sliced half of the bread. You can still employ the cheese tip to keep the sauce from making a thinner crust soggy. French loaves are the best types of bread for French bread pizza because they provide more surface area for toppings and more crumb for a better textural balance between chewy and crunchy. That said, ciabatta bread is another good alternative if you want to make French bread pizza for a crowd.

You can swap French bread for ciabatta in our recipe for white French bread pizza, but the airy crumb of the ciabatta won't need to be removed to make room for toppings. You can still slather the ciabatta halves with garlic butter before adding a light sprinkling of mozzarella and toasting. Then you can proceed with the rest of the recipe. If you want to skip a scratch-made white sauce, you can use this jar of Rao's Alfredo sauce instead. Once the ciabatta white pizza has come out of the oven for the second time, you can cut it into thinner vertical halves for individual pizzas or into strips for bite-sized snacks to feed a group.