Text by Michael Kalanty | Photos by Vitangelo Recchia, Bella Napoli Pizzeria & Restaurant
What is crumb structure? Let’s limit our discussion to the crown of the dough, or the corona—the ring of crust around the outside. Underneath the sauce, there’s also crumb structure, but that outside part is what Instagram often showcases: the cross-section with the webbing, the strands of gluten, versus how much air is in there. That is crumb structure.
You can have a tight, even, uniform crumb structure, where all the little air cells are pretty much the same size. Or you can have a very open, wide crumb, where you have maybe four or five large holes and then thin, diaphanous strands of dough webbed through it. Your crumb structure can be anywhere on that continuum.
A lot of people want a very open crumb structure—like a ciabatta, where you cut into it and there are big, beautiful air spaces. These air cells are called alveoli, and they’re so good because that’s where the flavor and aroma molecules live. The yeast dies off in the heat and is giving off its last surges of carbon dioxide, expanding, so any of the flavor benefits that the baker has created in fermentation are housed in those expanded cells. Cutting into the air pockets, you’re letting all of that aroma loose, and the flavor has permeated into the cell wall itself. That’s one of the advantages of an open crumb—it releases a lot of aroma when you first cut into it.
A Matter of Style
Some pizza styles are going to be more suited to an open crumb structure, like a Neapolitan. But that’s not what you would want in a deep-dish or Detroit-style pie; there, you want a crumb structure in which the air cells are generally smaller and more uniformly distributed.
When you put dough through a sheeter, you are deflating and compressing the air in that dough, which is ideal if you want uniform structure, with small holes all the way across. This is better for those pizzas where the toppings go close to the edge. In Rome, for example, they make a pizza that’s rolled out with a rolling pin, so that you get a uniformly cooked bottom of the pie.
The New York-style pizza works that way as well—because when you pick one of those slices up, you want to be able to fold it without it drooping down at the end. The only way to do that is to have a uniformly baked crust. When all the holes are uniform, it bakes flat on the deck and uniformly absorbs heat.
When you’re hand stretching the dough, like in the New York style, even if you have a uniform crumb structure in your dough itself, you’re forcing air out to the edge and thinning out the middle. Once you put the toppings on, the air on the edge is going to raise that corona more.
Crumb Contributors
For probably 75% of the pizza styles out there, you want a high-protein flour, from 12% to 14%. For a more open crumb, you also want a spring wheat, as opposed to a winter wheat. For a more uniform crumb, or a bready kind of chew, select a winter wheat.
The oven is also going to help create your crumb. With the Neapolitan style, you develop larger air cells because of the way you develop the dough. Those “leopard spots” on the crust’s bottom are like those big air bubbles that you see in the crust edge. When you have a large air cell and you press that dough against a hot oven floor, the areas around that cell pull away.
The higher the heat of the oven, the more lift you’re going to get in the corona. The other factor would be the balance of heat between the deck and the ceiling. That’s something that the pizza chef needs to experiment with in his or her own oven. For non-Neapolitan styles, something in the low-600° ranges—like 580° to 630°—can be a sweet spot for getting a lot of lift in the dough without the top burning.
| Vitangelo Recchia: “It’s Good to Make Mistakes” |
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| Chef Vitangelo Recchia, owner of Bella Napoli Pizzeria & Restaurant in Port Charlotte, Florida, and a member of PMQ’s U.S. Pizza Team, knows his way around a crumb structure: At his acclaimed restaurant, the master pizzaiolo offers Roman, Sicilian, Grandma pan, stuffed, New York and Detroit styles. He also won second place in the Pizza in Teglia category at this year’s World Pizza Championship and earned the highest score among all U.S. competitors at that event. Still, Recchia’s not afraid to learn the hard way—and, in fact, credits those missteps for making his dough game stronger. “There are little tricks of the trade that people learn, and they find out themselves by making mistakes,” Recchia explains. “It’s good to make mistakes, to see what you did wrong and see why things act the way they do. Then you can observe and tweak from there and all that fun stuff. It’s part of the art and the experience—making mistakes is what’s going to make you better.” |
Fermentation really makes a difference in the crumb structure, too. When you want an open crumb, you need to ferment the dough longer: 36 hours, 48 hours or even more. In the fermentation, the gluten starts to break down. The enzymes in the dough make it more extensible, so it can be stretched more without snapping back. That contributes to a better rise in the corona. When you ferment a 14% protein dough for 48 hours or 60 hours, you can stretch it out, and it won’t snap back. It’s going to rise, giving you maximum air.
The hydration is directly proportional to how large your air cells can be, but not how large they will be—that’s up to the pizza maker. For example, if you take a high-hydration dough and put it through the sheeter, you’re not going to get a lot of air. The water allows the gluten to stretch more, and the water also turns to steam in the heat of the oven. So the more steam you have inside that dough, the more it’s going to expand those air cells.
A 75% hydration dough is going to expand more than a 60% dough, but you can’t handle them the same way. You can’t put a 75% dough through a sheeter; you need a low hydration to do that. But a higher hydration is great for hand stretching and tossing. Because you still want to be able to handle it, you probably want hydration to be in the 70s.
Find Your Sweet Spots
Only the pizza maker—and his or her customers—can determine what the best crumb structure is. You might see something on Instagram that looks cool. But maybe you don’t have that kind of oven, and you don’t have that kind of flour. Maybe you have customers who say, “I don’t even like Neapolitan pizza—why don’t you make a crispy pizza?”
There are so many different styles, so it’s really a question of what style of pie you want to make. Then, with that style of pie, there is an ideal crumb structure that will give enough support in terms of how many toppings you’re adding, the oven you have, etc. Make your own decisions and play around with it!
Michael Kalanty is the owner of R&D Bakery in San Francisco, an author and a bakery product developer. His newest book, How to Bake Sourdough Bread: Fermentation, Starters & Formulas, will be released as an e-book in the fall of 2025. Visit MichaelKalanty.com for more information.
