Cooking For Engineers

[Melissa D. SC]

Hello all,

What is your input about freezing a home made pizza?

Do you freeze everything together?

Do you flash freeze the dough by itself and then add the sauce and toppings and then freeze everything together?

Don't freeze anything but the dough and only a month prior to using.....???

I am expecting a baby in February and we love my home made pizza but I wanted to have some in the freezer for after our baby was born....


Any suggestions about what is the best way to do this....

[Dilbert]

freezing things tends to extract moisture from them - cheese, pepperoni, veggies, not sure less a smidgen moisture in the tomato sauce would be an issue....

risen dough tends to not freeze all that well. there is the par-baked theory - let dough rise, make the crust or shape the loaf, bake half-way, thern flash freeze. "flash freeze" is hard to duplicate in the home refrigerator. nothing "flashy" about 0'F; minus 40'F yes, zero F, no.

I presume you've had the garden variety grocery frozen pizza - tastes like flavored cardboard, to me. home attempts to freeze may not fare much better mefears.

for short-cuts, I'd look at making up a batch of pizza dough in the dry state - flour, semolina, salt, sugar, yeast - then portioning it into "one pie" bags & keep in the freezer. add water, knead, 2-3 hrs later you got a really good dough.

tomato sauce - not hard to keep fresh in a jar
veggies - fresh onion, mushrooms, frozen diced peppers <and what else...>
pre-sliced pepperoni keeps well frozen (freeze on a flat sheet, bag after frozen so you don't have a single 'frozen lump mass'')
sausage - prep / saute a chunk of sausage, cool, spread out, freeze on a flat pan, bust up the chunks for ease of later use, keep frozen.

so there's certain bits you could short cut (hungry to eating time wise) other bits are more difficult.

on the dough - many pizza places keep the dough "made" into round balls and refrigerated over night. 24 hrs works, 36 is stretching it. the cold keeps the yeast from going wild - 'overnight' in the fridge is about 2-3 hours at room temp.) could work if you know 'tomorrow I want' - would cut down on the start-to-eating rise period.

[SomeBoy]

It is not a good idea to freeze the pizza because it will won't taste very good. That's my own opinion, maybe you like it.