If you’re experiencing a problem with large bubbles displacing the toppings on your pizza crust, one problem could be the type of sauce you’re using—for example, a BBQ or white sauce (or no sauce at all) as opposed to a tomato-based sauce. When that happens, you might be forced to remake those pizzas due to dough bubbles, which costs time and money you can’t afford to lose.

The type of pizza sauce can certainly have an impact upon the bubbling problem with a dough/crust. The problem stems from the baking temperature for the type of sauce applied to the dough skin. For example, when you bake a crust with just a tomato-based sauce, the water in the sauce evaporates and cools the top of the pizza, preventing or at least significantly reducing the incidence of bubbling.

However, when another type of sauce is used, especially when a lesser amount of sauce is applied the skin, the top of the dough quickly overheats, resulting in both gas and moisture expansion under the top of the dough skin. That can lead to the bubble formation that you are experiencing.

Related: Perfecting your pizza sauce part 1: How heat affects each ingredient and why it matters

To remedy this problem, try baking those non-tomato-sauced crusts at a lower temperature, about 400° to 450°F. Alternatively, try applying more sauce to the skin. With that latter approach in mind, however, you might want to dilute the sauce by 15% to 20% (that is, add 15% to 20% water to the sauce based on the total weight of the sauce) and then add 20% more sauce to the skin. That’s a good starting point. The added water will help prevent bubbling and will boil off during baking, so your actual amount of sauce will be the same as it was before. This could be a better option than using more sauce and adjusting the baking temperature based on the type of sauce used.

The late Tom “The Dough Doctor” Lehmann was the director of bakery assistance for the American Institute of Baking (AIB) and a longtime industry consultant and contributor to PMQ Pizza. The original version of this article appeared in the September 2016 issue of PMQ Pizza.

Dough Information Center, Food & Ingredients