Can you freeze pizza dough?

A good crust is the foundation of great homemade pizza, whether you're making your own favorite base crusta bubble Neapolitan stylea taste sourdoughor even a crispy one gluten free crust. But making pizza dough at home can be time-consuming. Maybe you've bought frozen pizza dough at the store and wondered: Can I freeze my homemade pizza dough?

Yes! Once the dough has gone through its first rise, divide, wrap, and freeze. When the pizza craving hits, you just thaw out the dough and pick up where you left off: shape the crust, let it rise, top it off, and bake it.

However, it's not just a matter of scooping up the dough and tossing it in the fridge. For best results when freezing pizza dough, follow this process.

A large round pizza on a marble counter, garnished with fresh basil and cut into six — The easiest pizza you'll ever make it's perfect for a crowd. But what if your expected crowd fails to show up? Freeze half the dough for another day!

Start with a good recipe – and adjust as needed

This may seem obvious, but don't try a new pizza recipe when you plan to freeze the dough. If the freezing process fails, you won't know if it's the recipe itself, or how you freeze the dough.

Almost any pizza dough recipe is suitable for freezing, but if your recipe already does not include fat, replace 2 to 3 tablespoons of the water in the recipe with olive or vegetable oil. Doing this will help reduce the formation of ice crystals (as well as minimize their size), which can damage both the yeast and the gluten.

You can also choose to increase the yeast in the recipe by 50%, especially if you want to keep the dough frozen for more than a few weeks. Whereas dry yeast is essentially unaffected by cold (which is why you can safely store it packaged yeast in freezing), liquid activated yeast is prone to damage during the freeze/thaw process. Adding more yeast than normal to the dough helps ensure there is enough left over when you are ready to bake.

Two photos, side by side; on the left, dough in a bowl; on the right, the same dough, fully baked. — Make sure your pizza dough doubles in size before dividing and freezing.

Make the dough and let it rise completely

You want the yeast in the dough to be fully active before you hibernate in the fridge. Give the dough enough time to double in size before freezing. While it's fine to include an overnight cold fermentation (to improve the flavor of the dough), don't try to freeze a batch of leftover dough that's been hiding in the fridge for days.

Four properly shaped balls of pizza dough on a baking sheet ready to be frozen. — It's best to place your dough pieces close together before freezing; they will not rise once they are cold.

Divide the dough into crust-sized pieces

Your recipe should indicate how much and what size crust it will yield. But if you don't like the recipe suggestion and want to make, say, small custom pizzas (or large Sicilian style rectangle), simply weigh your dough and divide as you wish.

Form each piece of dough into a ball or a slightly flattened round. How you shape the split dough depends largely on the space available in both the refrigerator (storage) and the freezer (thawing). Either way, lightly flour or oil the surface of the dough to prevent it from sticking to the wrapper later.

Note: Why not give the dough in its final rolled and flattened crust form right away, before it rises? First, because unless you're making very small pizzas, a shaped crust is a difficult fit for most freezers and refrigerators. And second, if you're going that far, you can take it a step further and pre-bake the crust, which will greatly extend its shelf life in the fridge. For details, see How to make frozen pizza at home.

Rise the dough

Arrange the formed dough in a Cooking sheet or other hard surface and place in the coldest part of the freezer, uncovered. You want the dough to rise as quickly as possible; for best results, the freezer temperature should be around 0°F. After about an hour (or when the dough is no longer sticky or soft), it's ready to roll.

Two balls of pizza dough wrapped in plastic, then sealed in a plastic zip-lock bag, ready to be refrigerated for storage. — Don't forget to date your dough bags!

Wrap the dough well

Wrap the “skin-tight” dough in plastic, then place in a plastic bag for extra protection. Store in the coldest part of your freezer, preferably away from the door. The more the dough is subjected to temperature changes, the greater the chance of ice crystals forming. For this reason, it is best to store pizza dough in a refrigerator that does not defrost itself. (Your best bet: a basic chest freezer.)

Three slices of baked pizza, piled on top of each other, showing the light and hollow interior of the crust. — The dough for this pizza was frozen for only a week, and it melted and baked well. However, the longer your dough is frozen, the more difficult it will be to rise.

How long can pizza dough rise?

We suggest freezing the pizza dough for no more than a month. While pizza dough is a better candidate for freezing than most yeast doughs, over time in the refrigerator some of the yeast will die—generally from ice damage, or simply from stress.

However, strangely, the dead yeast releases a substance called glutathione, which acts as a natural leavening agent. So frozen and thawed pizza dough is actually easier to shape than fresh dough.

Thaw the dough in the refrigerator

Unlike popping a store-bought frozen pizza into the oven and having it on the table 15 minutes later, turning your frozen pizza dough at home into hot pizza doesn't happen quickly. It's best to give yourself 10 to 12 hours between deciding you want pizza and sitting down to enjoy it.

First, remove as much dough as you want from the freezer and roll it out. Place the rounds on a baking sheet and cover gently with plastic. Let them thaw in the refrigerator for six to 10 hours, until they are soft all the way through. Flattened rounds will melt slightly faster than balls.

Baked pizza dough in a round pan, ready to bake and bake. — See the air bubbles developing in the center of this rising crust? This is a good sign that the yeast is awake and doing its job.

Form and let rise

Form each part of the dough into a crust (in parchment or in one frying pan), cover the crusts and let them grow at room temperature. How long this final rise takes depends on the warmth of your rising space, how firm the dough is after time in the fridge, and, most importantly, how thick you want your crust to be. For a thin, crispy crust, let the dough rise as little as possible, just 1/8″ or so; for a thicker crust, let it rise until doubled in height. In a warm kitchen, making pizzas with a thin crust and using healthy dough, plan on about 90 minutes.Any other variations, add time – a thick-crust pizza that grows in a fresh kitchen can take up to 5 hours or more.

Pizza hot from the round oven on a wooden cutting board, cut into eight slices. — this 10″ South Shore bar style pizza features a medium-thick crust (about 1/2″ high) and charred cheese around its edges.

Build, bake and eat

Preheat your oven to the temperature specified in the recipe. While the oven is preheating, pipe the tops onto the risen crust. Finish with a rain garlic oila splash of truffle bark, or some swings of pizza seasoning. Bake until done. (You be the judge of that.) While not quite as quick as frozen supermarket pizza, your version of frozen dough—with its chewy, airy crust and personal favorite toppings—is undoubtedly infinitely more satisfying. .

Does your hand-shaped (bad) pizza ever look like a map of Australia? Discover the best way to make a beautifully symmetrical crust: Why can't I make a round pizza?

Cover picture (Weeknight Neapolitan style pizza) and food styling by Liz Neily.

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