Pizza... Troubles With Bubbles

You can't beat a pizza for tea... tangy tomato sauce, meltingly golden cheese and as many toppings as you can cram onto the base before it's too high to fit in the oven.

Home-made is always best (we use our bread machine to mix and prove the dough while we're at work, so we can be eating pizza 20 mins after getting home from work).

However, done properly (with a blisteringly hot oven and a paper-thin crust) you can sometimes end up with bubbles popping up in the base... personally I quite like them but for professional pizza chefs they are a definite no-no.

Although this is probably the absolute definition of a first-world problem, the internet can supply a solution to your pizza-bubble woes.

The best option is to "dock" the dough... essentially pricking it all over with a fork or similar spikey implement to allow any air trapped between the dough layers to escape during cooking; if you are making pizzas in bulk you can even buy a machine to do it for you.

If your docking technique is not up to much and you still end up with bubbles - and especially if you're cooking in a full-size pizza oven - you can also buy a long-handled bubble-popper, designed specifically for this problem.  Alternatively a garden fork would probably do the trick.

So there you go... if your pizzas are plagued by bubbles do not despair, with a credit card, more money than sense, and a 3-4 week wait for transatlantic shipping your troubles could be at an end!

As for me I'm going to stick with my bubbly pizzas... there's something about the gentle rise-and-fall of the dough's undulations that puts me in mind of landscape around the southern fens where I grew up (that piece of parma ham totally looks like Ely cathedral too).