How To Make Gluten-Free Pizza Dough

The perfect pizza crust at home is chewy and crispy, with a slightly yeasty flavor. It should be easy enough to throw together on a Friday afternoon before friends come over. This is universally true for both traditional pizza and gluten-free pizza crust, despite the fact that each mixes and bakes up slightly different.

Working with a readily available gluten-free flour blend, we set out to make an easy gluten-free pizza dough. There’s no hard-to-find ingredients or overnight rises — just a crust that delivers that satisfying combination of chewy, crispy, savory crust that we all know and love.

When I set out to make a gluten-free pizza crust for myself and our friends, my main goal was ease. I didn’t want to require any specialty or hard-to-find flours — especially since there are so many gluten-free flour blends on the market. Diving into the world of gluten-free multi-purpose blends, I found that most were not truly “all-purpose.” Some blends are better for baking, others for chewy breads, and some you should skip all together. The main challenge is that different blends have different amounts of xanthan gum, the element that mimics gluten in gluten-free products. With that in mind, I’m suggesting one gluten-free flour blend that works well with this recipe.

If you’ve got the time and dough (pizza pun intended), you may prefer to experiment with other flour blends or making your own and adding the xathan gum as needed. Consider this dough a good place to start if you’re new to gluten-free baking or just doing it occasionally for family and friends.

• This recipe was formulated for Cup-4-Cup Multipurpose Gluten-Free Flour blend. This blend is readily available at most grocery chains or online. It was the easiest to work with and baked up crisp and slightly chewy. If you opt for another multipurpose flour blend, (including Cup-4-Cup’s Pizza Blend, which we found a bit sweet) your results will be different.
• Total rest and rise time for this dough is 30 minutes. You can prep your topping ingredients then.

• Avoid over-mixing. I would describe the mixing of gluten-free doughs as a curve: mix too little and you won’t get a rise, mix too much and you’ll have a gummy dough. So how do you know when a gluten-free dough is mixed enough? This particular dough will go from rough and shaggy to smooth with a texture similar to Play-Doh after about five minutes of mixing.
• Let the dough hydrate. One of the small but easy ways to make gluten-free dough more successful is to let the finished dough rest in order to fully hydrate the flour. This pizza dough doesn’t primarily rely on the yeast for its rise (it has baking powder for leavening too), so this 30-minute rest is mostly to ensure all the starches in the flour are fully hydrated.
• Spread rather than roll. Since there is no gluten in this dough, it won’t stretch and shrink like regular pizza dough. Use your hands to pat the dough out into a thin even layer on a sheet of parchment.
• Partially bake the crust before topping. The biggest issue with gluten-free pizza dough is that it can bake up gummy. Thats why it’s critical to partially bake the crust before topping it. This allows some moisture to escape from the dough before the sauce, cheese, and pepperoni can trap it inside the crust.

You can top this pizza dough with any of your favorite pizza toppings — there are no limits as long as you par-bake the crust before you top it. The first time you make this pizza, keep the toppings simple so you can learn how this dough bakes up. Since this dough is so easy to mix up and bake, we know you’ll be coming back to it for gluten-free variations on all of your favorite classic pizzas. Enjoy!