A doughy crust ...

[msarzo]

I've made a grand total of two pizzas from scratch, so I'm a definite n00b.

The first pizza I made with some supervision from my father, who has been taking up baking of late. A disagreement between us at the very beginning prevented him from practically doing the whole thing FOR me, but he later stepped in enough to be a sort of sous chef. I made that first pizza with bread flour.

Two weeks later was my second time around. This time, my father was out of town, so I was completely on my own. This time, I decided to use white whole wheat flour instead of bread flour. I also made my own sauce and used mostly mozzarella cheese instead of the mix of cheeses I'd used on my first pie.

Both pies had one big problem: The crust was really, really doughy. For the second pie, I knew to add flour to  the dough when it got really sticky, but the crust really took away from what otherwise would have been a decent pie.

Any suggestions about what I can do to make the crust less doughy? In each case, I brushed olive oil on the crust before putting toppings on it.

[Randy]

Any time you go with whole wheat and especially white whole wheat. a doughy pizza will follow.  You can do a blend of WW and BF but you will still be missing really good pizza.  Pizza and whole wheat just don't go together in my book.

Do a little research on this site and you will surely find a great recipe that meets your expectations.

Randy

[eterman]

You may want to go to a local bakery and buy a few pounds of Hi-Gluten flour (if they'll sell it to you).  H-G has about the highest amount of protein in the flour you can find and will give you a firm and chewy crust.  I'd start off by varying the percentage of H-G and all purpose unbleached flour (along with a SMALL percentage -maybe 10 - 15%- of WW  which is not the best when used 100%) in your mix until you reach the level you like.  If you can't get H-G from your local bakery, you can go online and buy it from, i.e. King Arthur, or a whole host of other baking supply places, but they might be a bit expensive for you.  Bread flour is lower protein level alternative.

[Pete-zza]

A doughy crust can result in several ways, including the dough formulation itself, the size of the pizza and its crust thickness, the type of sauce and amounts of toppings, the way the pizza is baked (e.g., on a pan, stone, screen, etc.), an oven-related problem (e.g., temperature, position in oven, duration of bake, etc.) or a combination of one or more of the above. It may be possible to solve the problem--which BTW is not limited to the whole-wheat pizza--but we would need to have a lot more information to diagnose the problem.

Peter