Freezing Pizza Dough - A Guide to Making Pizza Bases Last Longer

Making your own homemade pizza dough is both fun and rewarding. It tastes better because it is homemade and won't have any of the preservatives or additives common to commercial pizza brands. Once you make the homemade batch, with it is unleavened pizza dough or thick crust, you can store it either in the fridge or freezer.

Storing homemade pizza dough in the fridge

If you have dinner the next day and think you won't have time to make the pizza for work or any other reason, you can make the dough and keep it in the fridge. It is a perfect option to eat homemade pizza from one day to the next or hours later to make the dough.

However, if you want to keep it for longer this is a problem. Since there are active ingredients in pizza dough which will be working away, keeping it in the fridge longer than 2 or 3 days. After this time, the yeast will mean the dough will be bad for you if consumed.

Storing homemade pizza dough in the freezer

You can also freeze cooked or fresh pizza to keep homemade dough in good condition and to last longer. With keeping the homemade pizza dough in the fridge, different types will last different lengths of time. For example, those which do not use yeast may last longer because they don't have the bacteria acting with the other ingredients.

With the freezer, you can freeze any kind of pizza dough for months at a time. Keep reading for some tips and times to see how it is done.

Did you know that you can freeze pizza dough without stretching it first? We stretch the pizza dough to make the base as thick or thin as we like. This is one of the best methods to keep the dough in good condition and for a long time. At oneHOWTO, we explain the steps to do this:

1. Let the dough ferment and, after doubling its volume, knead it little by little. This way you will remove the gas generated by the dough during fermentation.
2. Cut the dough into several portions and form them into balls.
3. Wrap the portions in plastic wrap, to which you have previously put a little olive oil on top. This will prevent the balls from sticking and help preserve them for longer.
4. Put the portions in the freezer.

This is a very useful method for small freezers, since the dough is divided into smaller balls rather than one big lump.

Another method we have is to make the pizza bases from the pizza dough first. This has other advantages, but first we'll show you how it is done with these steps:

1. Let the dough ferment and double in volume.
2. Knead to remove the gas and separate it into different portions according to your base thickness and diameter.
3. Stretch each portion with the help of a rolling pin.
4. Separate the portions with sheets of baking paper greased with olive oil.
5. Wrap the portions together with plastic wrap.
6. Store them in the freezer.

This method can be good if you don't have much space left in the freezer, as long as the freezer is wide enough to accommodate the bases. Since the pizza bases are flat, they can often slide into a drawer on top of other produce fairly easily. This is even better if you wrap them individually.

Freezing pizza dough isn't the only time saving technique to help you. You can also cook pizza on the stove if you follow our guide on cooking pizza in a cast iron skillet.

The third method of freezing pizza dough is by rolling them up. It is an intermediate procedure compared to the previous two because it saves space in the freezer and defrosting time. However, it can be a little tricky.

To roll your pizza dough and freeze it afterwards you will need to:

1. Grease a sheet of baking paper with olive oil.
2. Roll out the prepared pizza dough on top of the sheet, but leave an inch or two at the end.
3. Carefully take the end of the baking paper and fold it over the top of one end of the pizza dough. Then roll this part on top of the dough and ensure the dough only sticks to the paper, not other parts of the dough.

This will give you a Swiss roll style dough parcel which you can slide into the freezer like a tube. Again, it is a different shape, so it will depend on your freezer space if this is best for you.

To take full advantage of the quality of a homemade pizza dough, you can freeze it for up 3 months. It is the ideal time to consume it without losing the flavor and texture, but you can also eat it later. These techniques will allow you to keep the pizza dough safe and ready to eat for a minimum of three months. After this time, it is safest to not use them again, but it may be possible. Better to stay on the safe side regardless

Unlike industrial pizzas, which are kept in the freezer longer, homemade pizzas hold well in this range. They can also be kept for longer, but the flavor suffers. Obviously, the quality of frozen homemade pizza dough will be superior to that of previously frozen industrial pizzas.

Here are some extra tips to help you freeze homemade pizza dough:

• To defrost the rolled pizza dough, simply remove it from the freezer and put it on the kitchen counter for 30 minutes. After this time, you can stretch it without fear of it breaking.
• Divide the dough into individual pizza bases so you only need to defrost as many as you need. This is why rolling the pizza dough is only good if you want to make a lot at once.
• So that the edges of the dough are crisp after cooking, pre-bake the dough before freezing it. Don't completely cook it, but partially pre-bake the portions in the oven for 10 minutes and then, when they cool again, freeze them. In this way, the day you want to eat them you only have to finish cooking them and the edges will be better.

Once you defrost and cook your pizza dough, you will need to decide what to put on them. While the options are endless, we can recommend options to create a low calorie pizza or go classic with an authentic Neapolitan pizza sauce.

If you want to read similar articles to Freezing Pizza Dough - A Guide to Making Pizza Bases Last Longer, we recommend you visit our Food & drink category.