Oil in Pizza Dough vs Butter and Lard: Fat Science

The simplest pizza dough is flour, water, salt and yeast. Fat is an option, not a requirement, and Modernist Pizza calls the decision to add it “an aesthetic and creative question for the pizzaiolo rather than a hard and fast rule.” Still, oil, butter and lard each change the dough in their own way, and fat in the pan is a different matter again.

What fat does in dough

Modernist Pizza (2021) describes several effects:

• Easier stretching. Fats and oils coat the gluten proteins and keep them from sticking to one another, which limits how long the gluten strands grow. Oil makes dough more extensible and easier to shape, though it also makes the dough take longer to mix. In very wet doughs the benefit is smaller, the authors found, because the dough is already too slack for it to make a difference.
• Texture. In bread, the authors note, lean doughs tend to have hard, crisp crusts and enriched ones a softer crust and crumb. In very low-hydration pizza doughs, such as their Brazilian thin crust, fat does something else: it makes the dough stretchier and the crust crisper.
• Flavor. Fats bring flavor compounds of their own and spread fat-soluble flavors from other ingredients through the dough.
• Reheating. Pizzas with some oil in the dough reheat better than oil-free ones, which tend to taste drier. The authors reckon that most if not all pizza sold by the slice contains some oil, while pizza eaten straight from the oven, Neapolitan above all, is usually close to fat-free.

Liquid and solid fats

Modernist Pizza sorts fats by their state at room temperature. Liquid fats, such as olive and peanut oil, are fluid. Solid fats, such as butter, lard and vegetable shortening, are partly crystalline: they contain tiny fat crystals, which melt as the dough warms.

The difference shows in the bubbles. As the dough is mixed and ferments, solid fat crystals attach themselves to the surface of the gas bubbles and stay put until the bake. While they slowly melt in the oven, they let each bubble expand without rupturing, which gives a crust with more volume. Oil and other unemulsified fats have the opposite effect: they thin the bubble walls and make them more likely to burst.

That doesn’t make oil a mistake. The same book found that small amounts of fat increased the volume of the Neapolitan-style recipes it tried that included some, and that its New York, thin-crust and artisan doughs did best with fat added. Its master New York and artisan doughs use oil.

If you use a solid fat, soften it before mixing it in, as Modernist Pizza advises.

Butter, lard and shortening

• Butter is at least 80% milk fat under US law, and most of the rest is water. Modernist Pizza found that the extra moisture in butter made its high-fat Brazilian crust less crisp than ghee, clarified butter, which also has a more neutral flavor.
• Lard is rendered pork fat, and for much of cooking history it was the main solid fat. It worked in Modernist Pizza’s tests, though the authors report that not everyone liked the flavor of some of their lard trials. Their table for Detroit-style dough says to use oil, not lard.
• Shortening is a solid vegetable fat. It was one of the solid fats Modernist Pizza tested in its master doughs.

The authors tested butter, lard, ghee and shortening alongside olive oil in their master doughs, at amounts up to 30%. For their New York, thin-crust, artisan, focaccia, New York square and al taglio doughs, either kind of fat produced a high-quality pizza at the master recipe’s percentage.

How much fat each style uses

The Pizza Planner follows its source recipe for each style:

Modernist Pizza’s master doughs give a wider picture:

These are the book’s own formulas and recommended ranges, not fat requirements for every dough of each style.

The two sources disagree on New York dough: Forkish uses none and Modernist Pizza uses 3.39%. Both are inside the book’s recommended range, and the Planner follows Forkish. Its Detroit dough, at about 4.2%, follows King Arthur and sits inside the book’s recommended 0–5% for that style, even though the book’s own master Detroit dough has none.

Their trials also found limits. In Modernist Pizza’s tested formulas, more than 10% fat made the New York, artisan and similar doughs harder to mix and shape. The Neapolitan dough was more sensitive: quality dropped once the oil went above 5%, and pizzas with 10 and 15% browned on the outside before the rim had baked through. Those are results for the book’s recipes, not a threshold beyond which every dough fails. The authors add that Neapolitan dough doesn’t really need oil in the first place.

Olive oil: extra virgin or not

Modernist Pizza uses extra-virgin olive oil in some of its doughs because the authors like its flavor, and notes that the crumb doesn’t get hot enough to break down the oil’s volatile compounds. They also say you can use pure olive oil instead. Recipes vary: Forkish’s bar pizza dough takes canola or olive oil, and King Arthur’s Weeknight Detroit uses extra-virgin. If you want a pronounced olive oil flavor, a drizzle after baking is the most direct route; see finishing oils and flaky salt.

When to add it

In Forkish’s bar pizza dough and DeliVita’s tonda, the oil goes in at the start: Forkish stirs it into the salted water with the yeast before the flour goes in, and DeliVita adds it with the water. Expect an oily dough to need a little longer to come together, since the oil coats the gluten. A solid fat should be soft before it goes in.

Fat in the pan

Fat under the dough does a different job from fat in it. For pan pizza, Forkish coats the pan with a film of olive oil or a clean animal fat such as bacon fat, lard or duck fat. That fat keeps the crust from sticking, and it flavors and crisps the underside as the pizza bakes; he notes that some in the pizza business would call it frying.

So a completely lean dough can still make a rich, crisp-bottomed pan pizza: King Arthur’s Sicilian-style dough has no oil in it, only in the pan. Modernist Pizza notes that its master Detroit dough, with no fat in the dough, still picks up some oil as it rests in the pan and as fat renders from the rim of cheese.

Two cautions from Forkish:

• Don’t leave dough on an oiled pan for long. A dough that spends all day or a night in the fridge on the pan absorbs the oil underneath and can then stick while it bakes. For a long-fermented pan dough, he ferments it as one ball and moves it to the oiled pan only at the end.
• Oil on a steel or stone smokes. He sometimes slides a pan pizza out onto the steel or stone to crisp the base, but only if the pan wasn’t oiled.

More on pan styles in Detroit-style pizza at home.

Sources

• Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, Modernist Pizza (2021), volume 1: printed page 316 (fats and oils in pizza and bread, extra-virgin olive oil, the deep-dish fats, the master-dough fat table), page 317 (how fats affect gluten, handling, crispness and reheating; liquid and crystalline fats; bubbles) and pages 318–319 (the fat-type and fat-percentage experiment across the master doughs).
• Ken Forkish, The Elements of Pizza (2016): chapters 1 and 2 (fat in and under pan pizzas), chapter 5 (finishing pan pizzas on the steel or stone) and chapter 6 (the pan pizza notes; the 48- to 72-Hour New York and Bar Pizza doughs).
• King Arthur Baking: Weeknight Detroit-Style Pizza (olive oil in the dough and the pan) and Sicilian-Style Pizza (no oil in the dough). Checked October 14, 2026.
• DeliVita: Classic Doughs: Romana Tonda (olive oil in the dough). Checked October 14, 2026.
• US Code, title 21, section 321a: the federal definition of butter (not less than 80% milk fat). Checked October 14, 2026.