What Makes a Good Pizza?

At Top Vegas Pizza, the search for the best pizza in Las Vegas is never ending. As we continue the hunt for Sin City’s finest pizza, you may want to know what we’re looking for. What makes a good pizza?

There are four main ingredients to pizza. You have the dough, which can also be referred to as the crust, the cheese, the sauce, and the toppings. At Top Vegas Pizza, we consider cheese and additional toppings to be separate ingredients.

Crust

Pizza crust is arguably the most important ingredient when it comes to pizza. It’s the foundation of it all. It supports the pizza and provides a canvas for the rest of the ingredients.

Of an entire pizza’s composition, the crust makes up the biggest portion of the finished product. Crafting the perfect pizza crust is a two-part process and you have to nail both to create a high-quality pizza crust that people will love and enjoy. First, pizza makers must make great pizza dough, because the dough is what turns into the crust. Then, they must cook it properly to create favorable pizza crust. You can make the best dough in the world, but if you can’t cook a pizza then it’s still a failure.

The crust is extremely important from a visual standpoint and the “feel” of a pizza. The way a crust looks can make a pizza appear under- or over-cooked. Satisfying the eyes can make someone’s mouth water or it can make them grimace in disgust. Does the crust looked cooked well enough? Does the crust look burnt? Does the pizza feel too flimsy, doughy, and under-cooked? That said, looks aren’t everything.

When someone grabs a slice, the “feel” needs to be right or else a person’s mouth will immediately stop watering. Am I holding a piece of burnt cardboard covered in sauce and cheese? Is it soggy or flopping over like a wet napkin? These are all questions we need to ask ourselves when rating the quality of a pizza and all of these questions can be answered through the crust.

The most important factor when it comes to determine the quality of a pizza crust is the crunch. There are many styles of pizza, and each can provide a different type of crust. For example, thin crust pizza can be on the crispier side, whereas Neapolitan pizza has a softer crust. You’ll know a good pizza crust the moment you take a bite.

Cheese

Good pizza comes with good cheese. Like the crust, the cheese on a pizza provides an element of appearance and feel in addition to its taste. Sprinkled on the top inner area of a pie, it’s important to get the look of the cheese just right because it is often the feature that draws in the consumer.

Although it’s common to think that cheese should cover an entire pizza and there should be no gaps or holes, that’s not always the case. It depends on the style of pizza that’s being made, so don’t judge a book by its cover, or a pizza by its cheese. There are many styles of pizza and several different ways in which the cheese is used. In most cases, the cheese should be thoroughly melted, not be too oily on the surface, and look the temperature of the pizza.

Sauce

Pizza sauce is the most underrated ingredient of a pizza. It’s not usually visible except for a few small spots, which makes people tend to forget about it as they see the crust and the cheese or toppings first. But, as anyone knows who has bitten into a pizza, the sauce contains a ton of flavor, making it an extremely important ingredient to the overall composition of a pizza.

It’s important to note that there are different styles of pizza that show more sauce or have the sauce on top of the cheese or other toppings. Don’t be turned away, though.

The amount of sauce used is also a factor to consider when grading how good or bad a pizza is. Different styles of pizza may require different amounts of sauce, but each style of pizza has what we would consider the right amount. Too little and a sauce isn’t providing the boost in flavor the pizza so desperately needs. Too much and a sauce can overwhelm everything above and below it, plus make a mess we don’t want to deal with. Too much sauce can also cause the dough to not be cooked properly and result in a soggy pie.

Toppings

We mentioned that we consider cheese and additional toppings to be separate ingredients, and we do. If you want to understand the true quality of a pizza, eat a slice of cheese and that’s it. That is, hands down, the best way to grade the quality of a pizza, in our opinion. But that’s not the only way.

Another good way to review a pizza is by trying out a slice of a pepperoni pie. You shouldn’t need to load a pizza with toppings in order to tell if a pizza is good or not. Just judge it by the quality of a piece of cheese pizza and then by the quality of a piece of pepperoni pizza.

As pizza lovers, we don’t expect you to stop at just cheese and pepperoni. We understand the realness of the situation. After all, having endless options to make a pizza unique to your liking is one of the absolute best things about pizza. Toppings can go a very long way to making a pizza better, but it’s difficult for us to say that the toppings should make the pizza. High-quality pizza toppings can turn a good pizza into a great one, but low-quality toppings can thoroughly ruin a pizza with no end in sight.

When it comes to pizza toppings, just remember, they can make a pizza better but they should never make the pizza.