Hey Jan,
If you've ever made the same dough twice and gotten completely different results, you're not alone - and it's probably not your flour, your water, or even your yeast amount.
Almost every dough problem I see comes back to one thing: fermentation. Dense crust, weak rise, bland flavor, sticky unworkable dough - these all look like different problems, but they're usually just different symptoms of the same thing being off.
The tricky part is that fermentation can go wrong in two completely opposite ways, and they look nothing alike. Too little and your dough is tight, hard to stretch, and tastes like cardboard. Too much and it goes the other direction - it gets sticky and weak, and it flattens out in the oven instead of rising. Because these symptoms look so different, it's easy to misread them and start tweaking the wrong things.
The fix isn't changing your recipe - it's learning to read your dough first. Tight and hard to stretch usually means it hasn't fermented enough. Sticky and structureless usually means it's gone too far. Once you can tell the difference, you know exactly what to adjust.
Here's the part most people miss though: getting your fermentation right doesn't just fix your dough - it's also where almost all of the flavor in a good pizza comes from. Better fermentation means a more complex, "bready" flavor that no ingredient can replicate. So give it the attention it deserves, and you'll notice the difference in every single bite!
Charlie
P.S. If you want to go deeper on fermentation and learn how to diagnose your dough before problems start, Total Pizza Mastery covers exactly this - and a lot more. Spots are opening soon - you can join the waitlist here!
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