Pizza Crust Made With Champagne Isn't Just a Gimmick — It's Scientifically Better

Make a crispier, fluffier pizza pie by adding Champagne, seltzer, or any other sparkling wine to your dough.

As someone who’s enjoyed her fair share of cozy winter pizza nights at home, I can personally attest to the fact that preparing the dough is no small feat. Our favorite classic pizza dough recipe requires patience, counter space, and careful measuring, all of which are part of creating the pie I recently tried at Serafina, New York City’s yellow-awninged Italian mainstay. Flour and yeast aside, the pizza also has one other key ingredient: Champagne.

I won’t say I’m jaded by restaurant specials that use unconventional ingredients (think: the Dirty Pasta Water Martini), but I certainly approach them with a noticeable degree of skepticism. Is it a publicity stunt for Instagram or TikTok? Is it going to just taste … weird? Will people judge me for trying it?

When I learned that Serafina was adding two entire 750ml bottles of Veuve Clicquot Brut Champagne to every batch of dough (yielding roughly 30 pizzas), I mainly expected to feel the difference in my wallet, because nothing says upcharge like Champagne pizza dough. Instead, I bit into an incredibly airy, cracker-like crust that played nicely with the cheesy decadence of Serafina’s Cacio e Pepe pie, created specifically to complement the dough. If you love the brioche and yeasty flavor of a good bottle of Champagne, you’ll adore (and actually notice) the slight, almost floral sweetness of this crust.

The process is fairly simple: To make the pizza, Champagne is added in place of water and is combined with the flour and other ingredients at the beginning of the dough-making process.

Related: 25 Pizza Recipes to Perfect

“One of the primary goals when making dough is to leaven the bread with thousands upon thousands of tiny air bubbles, which expand during proofing and baking to create a light, tender crumb. The main way of doing this is how breads have been made for millennia: with yeast,” says Daniel Gritzer, senior culinary director of Serious Eats. Gritzer notes that there are other ways to create or enhance the bubble structure of a batter or dough, including chemical leavenings like baking soda and physical ones like carbonated liquids. “Adding a sparkling wine like Champagne is one fairly expensive way to do that, and I have a lot of doubts about how much difference it would make in flavor and texture compared to simply making a quality dough using well-established bread-making techniques to make the most of flour, water, yeast, salt, and time.”

If you want to experiment with carbonated liquids in a dough, Gritzer suggests opting for the cheapest sparkling wine or even beer you can find, or plain old seltzer (though we recognize the pizzaz points associated with using Veuve). As to whether the resulting pizza dough will have alcohol, the answer is probably not. “Alcohol vaporizes at lower temperatures than water, so much of the alcohol that is naturally produced by yeast during fermentation cooks off during baking.”

Vittorio Assaf and Fabio Granato, founders of the Serafina group, said that their pizza chefs made multiple Champagne pizzas before landing on the perfect combination, playing around with both the amount of Champagne as well as the toppings on the complementary pie. The team also considered (and remains open to) using other sparkling wines like Prosecco or Cava and are curious to see how other bubbly might impact the pie’s texture and taste.

The Champagne pie is available at all Serafina locations indefinitely and is $29. While it won’t get you a Champagne buzz, it’s perfect to enjoy with a crisp bottle of bubbly.

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