Ask any pizza competition judge and they will tell you the same thing: the dough decides everything. You can top a pizza with the finest San Marzano tomatoes and aged mozzarella, but if the crust underneath is mediocre, the whole pie falls flat. The pizzerias that walked away with awards in 2025 — from the US Pizza Team championships to regional best-of rankings — all shared one defining characteristic. They obsessed over their dough. Here are the five techniques that defined award-winning pizza in 2025, and what every serious pizzeria operator can learn from them.
Neapolitan 72-Hour Cold Ferment
Cold fermentation is not new — but what the top Neapolitan-style shops in 2025 mastered was the precision of it. The technique is simple in concept: mix your dough, form it into balls, and refrigerate at a controlled temperature for 72 hours before use. What happens during that window is where the magic is.
During a cold ferment, yeast activity slows dramatically while enzymatic activity continues at a steady pace. Protease enzymes break down gluten strands, producing a more extensible and workable dough. Amylase enzymes convert complex starches into simpler sugars, which feed the yeast and also create the caramelization and char you see on the crust rim in a wood-fired oven. The result is a dough with dramatically more complex flavor — subtle acidity, a faint nuttiness, and that unmistakable Neapolitan blistering.
The 2025 award-winning variation: refrigerate at exactly 38°F (3°C), not simply "cold." Temperature variance of even 4–5 degrees changes fermentation speed enough to affect the final product. Serious shops use a dedicated dough refrigerator separate from their walk-in cooler.
Detroit-Style Pan Dough: The Focaccia Press
Detroit-style pizza had a breakout moment in 2025, and the shops doing it best had one thing that separated them from the copycats: a two-stage pan pressing technique borrowed from traditional focaccia making.
The approach works like this. After portioning your dough, you press it into the oiled steel pan and let it rest for 20 minutes. Then you press again — stretching it to the edges without deflating it. Rest another 20 minutes, then press one final time. This three-press approach (instead of a single stretch) allows the gluten to relax progressively, so the dough fills the corners of the pan without tearing or snapping back. The final result is a fully rectangular, even-thickness crust that bakes to an extraordinary caramelized, almost fried bottom from the pooled oil in the steel pan.
The award-winning variation in 2025 was using a higher-hydration dough (75–80%) than traditional Detroit recipes called for. The extra water creates larger interior air pockets and a crust that is simultaneously crispy on the outside and cloud-soft inside.
New York Hand-Toss + The Windowpane Test
New York-style pizza relies on hand-tossing — but the hand-toss is the final step, not the secret. The real technique that defined award-winning NY-style dough in 2025 was rigorous gluten development verified through the windowpane test before any tossing even begins.
The windowpane test is how you know your dough is ready. Take a golf ball–sized piece of dough and stretch it slowly between your fingers into a thin sheet. Hold it up to a light source. If the dough stretches thin enough to see through without tearing — forming what looks like a translucent window — your gluten network is fully developed. If it tears immediately, the dough needs more kneading or a longer rest period. No award-winning NY pie ever started with under-kneaded dough.
Once the windowpane test is passed, the hand-toss itself develops the thin center and thicker rim that is the trademark of the NY slice. The combination of gravity and centrifugal force from tossing stretches the center uniformly while leaving the outer edge thicker and puffier. Most shops cold-ferment their NY dough 24–48 hours at 40°F after making the dough balls, then temper it at room temperature for 2 hours before tossing.
Sourdough Starter Crust: Wild Yeast Complexity
Sourdough pizza is not new, but 2025 was the year it moved from artisan novelty to legitimate competitive format. Several shops that won regional best-pizza awards ran 100% natural leavening — no commercial yeast whatsoever — and the flavor difference is immediately apparent to any taster.
A mature sourdough starter (minimum 6 months old, fed daily) introduces wild yeast strains and lactic acid bacteria into the dough. The wild yeast provides lift and fermentation while the bacteria produce acetic and lactic acids that give sourdough crust its signature tang. The net result is a crust with more depth, a more complex chew, and a caramelization during baking that commercial-yeast doughs simply cannot replicate.
The 2025 commercial adaptation that worked best: use the sourdough starter as the primary leavening, add a very small amount (0.1–0.2%) of commercial yeast as a consistency insurance, and ferment for a full 48 hours cold. This hybrid approach delivers the wild-ferment flavor profile while reducing the batch inconsistency that makes pure sourdough risky at scale.
Roman Pinsa: The Ancient Grain Revival
If one style represented the breakthrough story of 2025, it was Roman Pinsa. Pinsa Romana — meaning "to stretch" in Latin — is a Roman street food that dates back thousands of years, but the modern revival has turned it into one of the most exciting styles in contemporary pizza competition.
What makes Pinsa unique is its flour blend: typically a mix of wheat flour, rice flour, and soy flour. The rice flour adds crispiness and lightness. The soy flour contributes protein and browning. The combination, combined with an extremely high hydration (80–90%) and a long cold ferment (48–72 hours), produces a crust that is simultaneously cracker-crispy on the exterior and extraordinarily airy inside — lighter than any other pizza style.
The Pinsa shape is oval rather than round, traditionally smaller (about 12 inches long) and meant to be served as a personal-sized portion. Because of the high hydration, Pinsa dough is not hand-tossed — it is gently pressed and dimpled with fingertips onto parchment or a lightly oiled pan. The bake is at high heat (500–550°F deck oven) for a short time to achieve maximum crust crunch without drying out the center.
The Science Behind Award-Winning Dough
Across all five techniques, the same variables separate extraordinary dough from ordinary dough. Understanding these principles means you can apply them to any style you make.
The Four Variables That Control Dough Quality
What This Means for Your Pizzeria
Every one of these techniques is achievable in a commercial kitchen. None of them require a wood-fired oven, an imported Italian deck oven, or any special equipment beyond a reliable refrigerator that holds a consistent temperature. What they all require is time and discipline.
The hardest part of adopting award-winning dough techniques is not learning them — it is building the operational systems around them. Prep schedules need to shift 48–72 hours earlier. Staff need to understand and follow temperature protocols. Batch sizes need to be calculated further in advance.
The shops that execute these techniques consistently at scale have one other thing in common: they handle their front-of-house operations as efficiently as their back-of-house craft. When your phone lines are chaotic, when orders get missed during the dinner rush, when staff are scrambling to answer calls instead of focusing on production — your dough suffers too. The craft and the operations are connected.
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