Store-Bought Dough: Whose is Best
The Best Store-Bought Dough For Your Pizza
Not everyone has the time or enthusiasm to make homemade pizza dough. We get it, it does take a lot of prep (but it’s worth it!). So what’s the next best option? - Store-bought dough. The real question is, who’s is best? We went out to test three of them. After some brainstorming, we came up with a good testing process. We purchased three different plain, premade dough balls from Trader Joe’s, Wholefoods, and Safeway.
Each dough ball was portioned to be 8 oz. We then stretched the dough out to 10 inches and followed that with 4oz of tomato sauce and 2/3 of a cup of low-moisture mozzarella.
Each pizza was then cooked for the same time in 3 Pizzeria Pronto Pizza Ovens.
The Taste Test
We had our coworkers try all three of the pizzas and rank them from least to most favorite. We also asked them to describe what they liked and didn’t like about each pizza’s dough. We had two clear front-runners: Trader Joe’s and Safeway, each having a very different composition in their raw form.
Safeway was under kneaded and had very little gluten developed, while Trader Joe’s was more properly kneaded. This created two very different dough textures: under-kneaded dough is lighter and develops less chewy texture when cooked.
-Pizza Tester Comments
The Most Favorite:
Trader Joe’s Brand Tasted good, best flavor, good chew, crunchy, nice and crispy, saltiest of the three.
Close Second Most Favorite:
Safeway Brand Good texture, crunchy, best flavor.
Least Favorite:
Whole Foods Brand - Too sweet, too tough, lacked crunch or too soft, stale, unpleasant aftertaste, floury, and we found it didn’t brown very well compared to the others.
The one thing that all doughs fell short on was seasoning. There was very little flavor because of the minimal salt used. You can fix this problem when using any store bought dough by adding more salt! Just sprinkle some on after the dough has been stretched.
Check out some of our other pizza tips:
- Help, My Pizza Is Stuck To My Pizza Peel
- No Mixer? No Problem. No-Knead Pizza Dough Recipe
- How To Make 24 Hour Pizza Dough
If you are interested to see what we are cooking today in the Pizzacraft kitchen - check us out on Instagram: @_Pizzacraft
8 comments
Wegmans dough is very good, whole wheat or white. I use to buy it until I found out how ridiculously easy it is to make your own dough. I haven’t bought dough since. We also mix a batch for 4 pies and cook all the dough and freeze the left over pies, quick easy dinner in a flash. My dough balls never seemed to freeze well and this is the best way even if you only sauce the dough and cook, it’s a great time saver on weekdays.
Thanks for the analysis. I have been using Trader Joe’s. It would be nice to hear a comparison of their 3 types (Sourdough, Whole Wheat, Rosemary).
I have also noticed differences in the dough once frozen then thawed, or made to Pizza while still to cold. Either way, I like these types of blogs (basically help us make a better pizza).
In my testing of the premade doughs, all seemed to be much too “liquidy” and thus sticky … did you add a little flour or is it my local shops which are doing something “unfortunate”?