Thicker tomato sauce on the pizza makes the cheese more slippery
After reading the advice about tomato sauce in this answer, I decided to try straining the sauce to remove water and see what it did to the crust.
I let the water drain out of a jar of tomato sauce by leaving it in a cheesecloth-lined colander. The sauce went down to almost half its volume, and I had to trowel it on the crust almost like spackle.
As usual, I used a pizza stone, and an oven that at about 500°F. The pizza takes about 7 or 8 minutes to cook, like this, rotating it twice in that time. I don't pre-heat the crust.
For this pizza, I used supermarket whole-wheat pizza dough (Stop and Shop makes a wonderful dough, incidentally), half-skim mozzarella, Barilla marinara sauce, fresh basil, and sauteed mushrooms and garlic. The pizza was delicious! The crust was thicker than usual, and lighter.
It seemed to me that the cheese was, for want of a better description, a bit looser than it usually was, and had a tendency to slide off the rest of the slice when you took a bite.
If I repeat this (and I will), I'll likely use even more of the same, strained sauce, since I got some requests for "more sauce, please, I could barely taste it." How can I "anchor" the cheese a bit? Mix a little cheese in with the sauce so it'll grab ahold of the cheese? Pre-bake the crust with sauce on it for a minute or two? (I'm not sure what that would do.) A staple gun, perhaps?
Best Answer
If you have to trowel the sauce on the crust it is too thick. There is a "right" consistency that will prevent the pizza from being too watery but will still have enough moisture to allow the cheese and sauce to fuse somewhat.
On the other hand, you could just ignore that the cheese isn't fusing. I've eaten thousands of pizzas in Italy and most of them are more watery that what you'd get in the US and the cheese usually does not fuse with the sauce. Probably because it's only in the 800°F brick oven for about 3 minutes! Enough time to cook the thin crust, barely melt the cheese, and that's it.
If you really want that cheese to fuse, I would suggest a slightly more watery sauce, and more heat from the top. Turn on the broiler for the last minute or so until the cheese starts to bubble. This will also help evaporate some of the extra water in the sauce.
Pictures about "Thicker tomato sauce on the pizza makes the cheese more slippery"
How do you keep cheese from sliding off pizza?
the simplest way to fix it is mechanically - mixing part of the cheese into the sauce. This helps add moisture to the cheese, since it is coated in the sauce, and helps dry the sauce (less cheese on top means the sauce is more exposed).Should pizza sauce thick?
Typically, pizza sauce should be about as thick as ketchup is. Not runny, but not clumped together too much either. If your sauce is too thick, you can add one teaspoon of water at a time until it is the thickness you want. When making a smaller pizza and using less sauce, you need to add less water to thicken it.Does extra sauce make pizza soggy?
Adding the sauce and then leaving the pizza to sit around before adding the toppings is going to cause the moisture from the sauce to seep into the dough and this will create a soggy base. This also applies if you add the sauce and toppings and then leave the pizza for some time before cooking it.Why does my cheese not stick to pizza?
If you don't add anything to your sauce and still have this problem, simply try cutting back on the amount of sauce you add to the pizza. 3. Too much oil on the dough skin. To a lesser extent, we found the application of too much oil to the dough skin (prior to saucing) can also promote cheese slip.TOMATOES TOO WATERY? TIPS HOW TO FIX IT
More answers regarding thicker tomato sauce on the pizza makes the cheese more slippery
Answer 2
Cheese in Italian pizza is usually "floating" on top of the tomato sauce and quite slippery, especially when the pizza gets colder, so what you got with your pizza seems quite right to me.
One trick I used a while ago for sticking the cheese to the dough was to put mozzarella slices on it before the tomato sauce, instead of the opposite. This way the cheese tends to stick more to the dough and remains softer.
Be aware that this doesn't work each and every time, and it depends greatly on the quality of the mozzarella: for pizza it must not be too moist (if it is you should drain it a little by grating or slicing it and keeping it in a colander for a couple of hours), and it shouldn't be too stringy when melted, as it will tend to "float" more on the slices (besides that, it is generally a sign that the mozzarella is not of a very good quality)
Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Images: Edward Eyer, Brett Jordan, Engin Akyurt, Pablo Macedo