There are thin crusts. There are thick crusts. There’s that weird cracker-style crust your friend swears by, and the bubbly Neapolitan crust that’s basically a flex at dinner parties. But this? This is something else entirely. Laminated pizza dough — the same technique used to build croissant layers — has arrived in the home pizza scene, and it’s the most genuinely exciting dough development I’ve come across in years.

When King Arthur Baking named their Flaky Puff Crust Pizza as the 2026 Recipe of the Year, it wasn’t a gimmick. It was the result of over 70 test versions developed in their Test Kitchen, and the kind of thing that makes you stop mid-bite and say “wait — is this a pizza or a pastry?” The answer, delightfully, is both.

Let’s break down exactly what this technique is, why it works, and how you can pull it off at home without a panic attack or a second fridge dedicated entirely to cold butter.

What Is a Laminated Pizza Dough?

Lamination, in the pastry world, refers to the process of folding fat — usually butter — into dough in layers. It’s what gives croissants their shatter, puff pastry its height, and certain biscuits that melt-in-your-mouth quality. The technique isn’t new. What is new is applying it to pizza dough in a way that’s accessible to home cooks who don’t have a sheeter machine or a culinary degree.

Traditional lamination (think: croissant) involves creating a butter block, wrapping it in dough, and performing a series of precise folds with rest periods in between — often spanning 24 hours or more. King Arthur’s approach skips all that fussiness. Instead, you grate cold butter onto parchment, freeze it solid, then fold it into a rolled-out dough rectangle using simple letter folds. Two rounds of folding, a couple of rest periods, and you’ve got a dough with distinct butter layers ready to go.

It’s also related to a concept called pizza sfogliata — an Italian tradition where pizza dough is laminated with olive oil rather than butter. King Arthur’s version swaps in frozen grated butter for richer, more pastry-like results. If you’ve ever made Detroit-style pizza, you’ll know butter and pizza are already best friends — this just takes that friendship to new, layered heights.

Why This Trend Blew Up in 2026

King Arthur didn’t just stumble onto this by accident. Their Test Kitchen was simultaneously working on three different projects: sheet-pan pizza recipes, biscuit recipes using grated butter, and a Croissant Sourdough Bread developed by baker Martin Philip that incorporates grated butter through a series of folds. Put those three ideas in a room together long enough and someone eventually says “what if we did that to pizza dough?”

They were also tracking the rise of thin-crust styles — particularly Chicago tavern-style pizza — and wanted to create something that could feed a crowd, work on a standard home sheet pan, and require zero specialty equipment. No baking steel. No pizza stone. No special oven. The laminated pizza crust ticks every one of those boxes.

The timing also matters. Home bakers who came up through the pandemic sourdough era now have solid foundational skills. They want the next challenge. Laminated pizza dough is the perfect bridge: it sounds technical, takes about two hours from start to finish, and delivers results dramatic enough to feel like a proper achievement. (Plus your guests will absolutely lose it when you explain what you did to that crust.)

The Science: Why Butter Creates Flaky Layers

Here’s the part that might make your old high school chemistry teacher proud. When you fold frozen grated butter into pizza dough, you’re creating alternating layers of fat and gluten network. The fat keeps those layers separate — it physically prevents the dough from fusing into one uniform mass. When the pizza hits a 475°F oven, the water content inside the butter rapidly converts to steam.

That steam has nowhere to go except outward, pushing the dough layers apart and creating air pockets. The result is a crust that’s simultaneously crisp on the bottom, flaky through the middle, and lighter than it has any right to be given how much butter is in it. It’s the same physics that drives a croissant or a pie crust — just applied to something you’d normally slap pepperoni on.

The key is keeping that butter cold and solid until the moment it hits the oven. This is why you freeze the grated butter before working with it, and why the recipe asks you to pause and refrigerate the dough if it starts warming up during rolling. Warm, soft butter doesn’t create layers — it just gets absorbed into the dough and you end up with an enriched dough situation, which is perfectly nice but not the point.

Understanding this also explains why flour choice matters here. King Arthur recommends their ’00’ pizza flour for this recipe because it’s finely milled, lower in protein, and creates a more extensible dough that’s easier to roll thin without snapping back every three seconds. All-purpose flour works too, but expect slightly more resistance during rolling and a marginally denser finished crust. Either way, the layers will form — it’s the butter doing the real work.

Step-By-Step: How the Lamination Process Works

Let’s walk through the technique itself, because understanding each step makes the whole process significantly less stressful the first time you do it.

1. Prep and Freeze the Butter

Use the large holes of a box grater to shred cold butter directly onto parchment paper. Spread it into an even layer, fold the parchment over it like a book, and freeze for at least 30 minutes. You want this butter solid — frozen, not just cold-fridge cold. This can be done days in advance, which is a genuinely useful bit of project management for busy weeks.

2. Make the Dough (It’s Simpler Than It Sounds)

Combine flour, instant yeast, salt, and a small amount of sugar. Add lukewarm water and olive oil. Stir with a spatula until it comes together into a rough, shaggy dough, then knead briefly on a floured surface for 1–2 minutes. This is a relatively firm dough — don’t panic. Cover and let it rise at room temperature for 30 minutes. It won’t double in size; it just needs to relax and develop a little structure.

3. The Letter Fold (First Round)

Roll the risen dough out to roughly 10″ x 13″ on a lightly floured surface. Work quickly here — cold hands and a cool kitchen are your allies. Scatter most of the frozen grated butter across the dough surface and gently press it in with floured hands. Fold the left third toward the center, then fold the right third over the top — just like folding a letter for an envelope. This is called, unsurprisingly, a “letter fold.”

4. Second Butter Round and Final Fold

Scatter the remaining frozen butter over the folded dough, press gently, then perform a second letter fold in the opposite direction (top third down, bottom third up). Pinch the seam lightly — not the sides — and press into a rough 1-inch thick rectangle.

5. Roll, Rest, Repeat

Begin rolling the dough out to a 13″ x 18″ rectangle — the size of a standard half-sheet pan. The dough will resist at first. If it snaps back, cover it for 15 minutes and let the gluten relax. That’s not failure; that’s gluten doing its job. Keep going until you’ve reached your dimensions, pop any visible butter bubbles with a knife tip, and dust any slippery butter patches with flour. This is also why understanding how to control dough texture pays off — a well-developed gluten network handles rolling much more gracefully.

6. Pan, Rest Again, Top, and Bake

Transfer the dough to your sheet pan and let it rest another 30 minutes — it needs to relax into the corners and get a little puff back. Add toppings (more on that below), then bake at 475°F on the center rack for 14–18 minutes until deep golden and audibly crunchy. You’ll know it’s ready when you can lift a corner and the bottom is evenly browned.

Topping a Flaky Crust: Less Is Genuinely More

I’ll be direct with you: this crust is the star. The toppings are the supporting cast, and an overzealous topping hand will ruin the performance. The butter-rich, layered crust cannot support the moisture load of a standard pizza build, so restraint is non-negotiable here.

King Arthur’s base recipe uses a three-cheese approach — grated low-moisture mozzarella for melt, small cubes of fresh mozzarella for creamy pockets, and grated Parmesan underneath both to add salt and umami without the risk of over-browning. The sauce layer is kept deliberately thin. And the finishing move — a drizzle of lemon-and-garlic-spiked basil oil over the baked pizza — adds brightness and punch without a drop of additional moisture touching the crust during baking.

If you want to add toppings beyond cheese, pepperoni is your safest bet — it’s low moisture, crisps in the oven, and the fat renders beautifully into the laminated crust beneath it. For vegetables, pre-roast anything with significant water content. Check our guide on roasting vegetables properly before loading them onto this kind of crust — the prep step genuinely matters here in a way it doesn’t on a bready pan pizza.

And if you want to get creative? Think along the lines of what we’ve explored with burrata pizza — added post-bake, so the moisture never touches the crust while it’s in the oven. That’s the move. Cook the crust perfectly, then let the toppings join the party when everything is already crisp and golden.

This restrained topping philosophy actually shares DNA with Neapolitan pizza technique, where every component is chosen precisely and excess is seen as a kind of amateur hour. The difference is that on a Neapolitan pizza, the crust can handle some moisture because of how quickly it bakes. On a laminated crust, the enemy of great texture is always wet toppings that steam the crust from above while it’s trying to get crisp from below.

How Laminated Crust Compares to Other Styles

The comparison most people land on — and that The Kitchn noted in their review — is Totino’s party pizza. That nostalgia-drenched thin cracker crust with the satisfying snap? The laminated version hits a similar register, but the texture is genuinely more complex. It’s not just crispy — it’s layered. You can see the striations if you look at a cross-section of the baked crust. It’s the difference between a cracker and a croissant, somehow made into pizza.

It also compares interestingly to Detroit-style pizza, which uses butter in a different way — pressed into the pan and cooked along the edges and bottom to create a crispy, cheesy crust perimeter. Both use butter as a central technical element; they just approach the result from opposite directions. Detroit gives you a pillowy, buttery interior with crispy sides. Laminated pizza gives you a flaky, pastry-like crust throughout.

If you’re used to working with sourdough pizza dough, you can absolutely apply lamination technique to a sourdough base. The longer fermentation will add flavor depth, and the open crumb structure from sourdough activity pairs beautifully with the butter layers. Just be prepared for a longer timeline and the need to work with a slightly wetter dough — use cool hands and move with intention.

Final Thoughts: Is This Worth the Effort?

Here’s the honest answer: yes, 100%, but you need to recalibrate your expectations of what “effort” means. This isn’t difficult. It’s just time-distributed. You’re not doing anything particularly skilled — you’re grating butter, folding dough a couple of times, and rolling it out. The two-hour window is mostly waiting, and King Arthur specifically designed those rest periods so you can be making a salad or setting the table in the meantime.

What you get out the other side is a pizza unlike anything you’ll order from a delivery app or find at a local pizzeria. The texture is genuinely novel — pastry-flaky and pizza-savory at the same time. And because the technique is rooted in real baking science (fat layers, steam, gluten relaxation), once you understand why each step works, you can start riffing. Different fats. Different flour blends. Sourdough base. Herb-infused butter. The laminated pizza crust isn’t a recipe — it’s a technique you’ll come back to.

If you want to go deeper on dough before attempting this, our ultimate homemade pizza dough guide covers the fundamentals — and understanding the basics of dough rise timing and how flour affects hydration will make your first laminated crust attempt significantly smoother. The more you understand what the dough is doing and why, the more instinctive the adjustments become.

Go grate some frozen butter. Make a flaky pizza. Impress literally everyone who eats it.