There are five options for crust creation. From parbaked or pre-baked crust to dough prepared from scratch, we offer the method best suited for your operations. Here are the advantages and drawbacks of each.

Dough from scratch	Parbaked and Pre-baked crust
Frozen rolled dough	Frozen dough ball
Dough from a mix	Pizza Solutions Home

Dough from scratch
Preparation involves mixing flour, water, salt and yeast. Some recipes call for additional ingredients like sugar, shortening, eggs and milk.

For quality dough, the ingredients must be top quality, measuring must be precise, ingredient temperatures must be right and mixing time must be precise. 

In addition, dough must be held at the right temperature for fermentation and must be scaled and rounded properly.

Dough from a Mix
A mix—sometimes called a pre-mix or pre-blend—com­bines dry dough ingredients into a bag or box.

Advantages: 

• Reduces scaling time and measuring errors.
• More economical than mixing from scratch.
• Reduced training time and the chance of human error.

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This crust option eliminates dough-making altogether.

Advantages: 

• Minimal labor, cost, training and supervi­sion.
• No special equipment.
• Minimal purchase and storage of ingredients.

Drawbacks:

• More expensive than other options.
• Consistency issues.
• Unable to create custom recipes.
• Requires a freezer.

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Also available in rolled or sheeted form. 

Thaw frozen rolled dough on a screen or pan.

Advantages: 

• Eliminates need for dough rolling and related equipment. 

Drawbacks:

• More expensive than other options.
• Consistency issues.
• Unable to create custom recipes.
• Requires a freezer.

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Parbaked or Pre-Baked Crust

The ultimate in crust handling convenience is the par­baked and pre-baked crust—sometimes known as a “shell.”

Parbaking is accomplished with either an oven or a hot press; thereby resulting in two types of parbaked crust: 

Dense and thin, a pan-proofed oven-baked crust, the dough is allowed to proof or rise in a pan and then baked at a low temperature/time than regular pizza baking.

With a sheeted press-baked crust, dough pieces are put into a hot press and stamped out, resulting in an airier and thicker crust. 

Advantages: 

• Parbaked crust requires no scaling, mixing, dividing, rounding and clean-up—so almost no labor is required and very few errors occur.
• No proofing, rolling or sheeting.
• Consistent crust quality.
• Easy to handle.
• Shortened bake time by 1-3 minutes over other crusts. 

Drawbacks: 

• Crust interior may not be as hot as raw pizza baked in one step.
• Tends to dry out and stale more quickly than crust baked from fresh dough.
• Greater tendency for cheese and toppings to slide off pizza.
• Top edge of the crust has a raw or doughy appearance.
• Higher food cost.

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