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
We prepare our pizza dough the day before. To simplify the process we use our bread machine on the dough setting. Once the batch is done we separate the dough into two balls and place it in a plastic container with a lid and put it in the fridge to cold ferment overnight. It is necessary to punch them down a couple of times during the next day and prior to use. Take it out of the fridge 1/2 an hour before you plan to stretch so that it has to warm up a little. One batch in our machine yields 1.5 lbs (700 grams) which is the right amount for two 12" pizzas. If we want more, we do more batches. Since doing this, we have never bought store made dough.
Hi Keith! We added some flour, but only enough to kneed the dough with and prevent from sticking to various surfaces. The dough you’re getting might be frozen ahead of time. That could add a lot of liquid. Make sure to let the dough sit out of the fridge for a time and work in some more flour so it’s tight and not gooey. Have you tried making your own dough? It’s really fun and totally doable. Not as hard as it may seem.
Hi Mark! This was a test many of us have been wanting to do for a while and I LOVE your idea of testing all three Trader Joe’s doughs. That might be coming up very soon…
We really want this blog to be a resource for people to make better pizza!
Try House of Pasta pizza dough. Bought frozen at shop rite. Two dough’s, i lb. each for about $4.00. Total. Best store bought dough I’ve ever had. From Trenton, N.J.
if you would have tried Trader Joe’s wheat pizza dough, you would not have thought that the seasoning was lacking. You just didn’t try enough doughs to find the best!