Pizza problem-solver handbook

Your dough tears, snaps back, or welds itself to the peel. Here is why, and the fix for each.

Most pizza problems trace back to one of about six causes: fermentation, gluten development, dough temperature, technique, or the thing that's actually behind more of this than people expect, not enough heat in a home oven. The Pizza Problem-Solver Handbook is 23 pages of straight diagnosis and fix, built around eight specific problems that come up night after night at home.

What you'll gain

• Diagnose a torn or snapping-back dough in under a minute and know whether it's fermentation, gluten development, temperature, or technique, before you waste the next ball making the same mistake.
• Stop losing pizzas to the peel. Know exactly why a launch fails and how to rescue one that's already stuck, without panicking mid-bake.
• Get real char on the crust out of an ordinary home oven, using the broiler finish method instead of hoping a hotter thermostat setting will do it.
• Fix a soggy or gummy base by understanding the actual heat-versus-moisture race happening under your toppings, not just "cook it longer."
• Set a proper preheat protocol so your steel or stone is genuinely ready before the dough goes anywhere near it, instead of guessing at 10 minutes.
• Walk away knowing which of six root causes is behind almost every pizza problem you'll ever hit, so future troubleshooting gets faster every time.

What's inside

A 23-page A4 PDF, delivered as an instant digital download, covering eight problems: dough tears when stretching, dough snaps back and won't stretch, dough sticks to the peel (failed launch), soggy or gummy base, pale crust with no char, gum line under the toppings, dense or bready cornicione, and burnt bottom with a raw top.

Each major problem gets a diagnosis page (symptom, cause table, how to confirm which cause is yours) and a fix page (the correction plus a prevention checklist). Three more clear-cut problems share a single combined page.

The back third of the handbook is a dedicated home oven heat chapter: why a domestic oven caps out around 250 to 275°C against a wood-fired oven's sustained 430 to 485°C, steel versus stone, the broiler finish method, a proper preheat protocol, and a cheat sheet for Ooni-style portable ovens. Original diagrams and real photography run throughout.

What this handbook doesn't cover

This is a troubleshooting guide for dough handling, launch, and oven heat on a standard home pizza night. It doesn't cover pizza dough formulas or baker's percentages (that's the separate Pizza Style Formula Pack), topping or sauce recipes, or wood-fired and outdoor oven setup beyond the Ooni-style cheat sheet page. If you already know your formula and just want to stop tearing dough or burning the bottom while the top stays raw, this is built for exactly that.

Keep going

Buying this with the Pizza Style Formula Pack too? The Pizza Pro Pack bundles both for £18 (pizza-pro-pack), the formulas to build the dough right alongside the troubleshooting for when something goes wrong anyway.

Two free DoughRise calculators pair directly with this handbook: the Pizza Dough Calculator and the Hydration Calculator, both useful for checking whether a "technique" problem is actually a numbers problem.