Do your pizzas turn soggy not long after emerging fresh, hot and crispy from the oven? What can you do to get a consistently crispy pie that your delivery and carryout customers won’t complain about?

It’s a common problem. Pizza can become soggy shortly after baking for any number of reasons, but let’s discuss the three most likely causes.

1. Getting steamed. Failure to allow the pizza to “steam off” after baking is probably the most common reason for loss of crispiness. Immediately upon removing the pizza from the oven, you’ll want to place it on a wire cooling rack or a pizza screen. This will allow the steam to escape from the pizza rather than letting it get forced back into the crust, which will make it lose its crispiness. Leave it on the rack for about 30 seconds to one minute at most.
2. It’s hot in here! Pizza can also lose its crispiness if it’s baked at an excessively high temperature. In this case, the pizza’s crust will have only a very thin layer of crispiness; once this thin layer absorbs moisture, its crisp is quickly diminished or lost completely. That’s why pizzas that are baked quickly in a very hot oven are fine for dine-in but tend to become soft and soggy in a DELCO application. Boxing a DELCO pizza holds in all that steam for an extended period of time, leading to a softer, soggier pizza. The problem gets worse when the box is placed in an insulated delivery bag!
3. Too Much Sugar. The third most common reason for a soggy pizza is the use of too much sugar in the dough formulation. Excess sugar impacts the pizza’s retention of crispiness in a number of ways. First, it yields a crust that colors faster, resulting in a shorter baking time, which definitely impacts crispiness. Then there’s the problem of residual sugar in the crust, especially in the browned portion, where the sugar becomes concentrated due to the lower moisture content. In this case, the sugar, being hygroscopic (meaning it absorbs or attracts moisture from the air), readily pulls moisture from both the inner crumb portion of the crust as well as the environment around the crust—which is highly moisture-laden immediately after baking—resulting in, once again, a loss of crispiness!

So what can you do to prevent a soggy crust? Put a thin application of oil on the dough skin prior to dressing it, as this will impede moisture migration from the sauce and toppings into the baked crust. To the extent possible without sacrificing taste, minimize the amount of sauce and vegetable toppings used on the pizza. If you are thinning your sauce, don’t, or thin it as little as possible (test your sauce by putting a spoonful onto a china plate and see if there is any syneresis (weeping of moisture) taking place over a 10-minute period of time. A little (like a halo) is OK, whereas a lot, to the point where it’s running across the plate, is problematic.

Think about maximizing your pizza’s baking time if you are not already doing so. Allow the pizzas to steam off for a minute or so before cutting and boxing (nothing good ever came from putting a steaming hot pizza into a closed box). Use ripple sheets or pizza liners under the pizza when you box it. Make sure your boxes have steam vents and make sure they’re opened.

Finally, when it comes to DELCO pizzas, an air impingement oven provides a drier pizza, better suited to the DELCO concept than a typical deck oven.

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. This article originally appeared in an earlier issue of PMQ and has been updated to keep the content fresh and relevant.