Can you use a frozen premade dough and be successful?

[thebuzzman]

If you have a sauce that is fantastic, toppings and cheese that are quality and fresh, can you use an Areezio frozen dough ball and form into the desired texture and thickness you want and still be perceived as quality specialty pizza?  We have tried this frozen dough and have had great success.  Of course there is more to the story, but we want to know the professional opinion.  Do you have to make your own dough to be perceived as quality pizza?

[Pete-zza]

thebuzzman,

A frozen dough can produce decent results but most often the decision by a pizza operator to go with frozen dough balls is because the volume they need is too low to justify the investment in equipment, space and people to make their own pizza dough. For a professional opinion, and the pros and cons of frozen dough balls, you may find this item of interest: http://www.pmq.com/cgi-bin/tt/index.cgi?noframes;read=23297.

Peter

[John39840]

I've used frozen dough in the past. Often, if it's more than three days old, you won't get a decent enough rise. Unless, of course, it's vacuum sealed properly. And then, I'd imagine it could last a fairly long time. But I try to avoid using frozen dough overall. I find it's just too hard to control all the variables enough to create a consistent quality pizza.

[enchant]

I got a nastygram from an irate pizzamaking.com member who found my opinions on frozen dough sacrilege.  Over the past few months, I've had some good success making my own dough, but prior to that, I was buying my dough at a bakery just a little north of Boston.  They sold frozen dough balls in cases of 30.  I found that defosting a dough ball in the fridge about 30 hours before baking gave me a terrific crust.  However, after several weeks went by, the composition of the dough balls (even though frozen) started to alter, and it wasn't that good.

So I think that if you can get a consistent and fresh product, you can probably get good results.

My opinion on making a pizza with frozen dough was that there are other aspects to a pizza other than dough, and using a known good dough gave me the opportunity to perfect the other aspects of my pizza creation process - sauce recipes, cheese types and brands, oven temperature and bake time, etc.  Once I was getting a pizza that I liked, I started experimenting with creating dough.