My personal recipe for creating delicious Neapolitan pizza.
- Prep time: 24-72 hours (1-3 days)
- Pizza stone (cooks pizza faster)
- steel pizza peel (for moving pizzas out of the oven)
- wooden pizza peel (for moving pizzas into the oven)
- San Marzano tomatoes (1-2 32 ounce can). Can be found in most grocery stores in italian section.
- King arthur bread flour (4-ish cups. I don't measure - see below for instructions)
- corn meal (for dusting pizza peel. Prevents dough from sticking)
- Yeast. 1 cup of starter, or 1/2 packet of dry yeast. (Starter yeast if the best btw)
- Olive oil (3 tbs-ish)
- Salt (1 tbs)
- Fresh Basil
- 1 1/2 cups of water (warm or cold. Doesn't matter)
- 1-2 balls of fresh mozarella (I typically use 1 big ball for 4 pizzas)
- mozarella, prosciutto, pepperoncini, basil
- mozarella, kalamata olives, thyme
- mozarella, pepperoncini, kalamata olives
Good pizza takes time. Here's what you'll need to do 1-3 days in advance:
- Add water to a mixing bowl with yeast, olive oil (3 tbs), and salt, and 1 cup of flour. Mix it around and let it sit for 10 minutes.
- After 10 minutes, continue to incremently mix flour into your dough until you have a consistency that's hard to work with a ladel / whisk.
- Move your dough onto a surface and lightly kneed it, incorporating additional flour into the dough.
- Break the dough into 4 balls, and brush them with olive oil.
- place the 4 balls of dough in a sealed container and put them in the fridge ffor 1-3 days. (The longer the dough sits, the more crunchy and flavorful the crust will get).
- After your 1-3 day cold rise, place the 4 balls of dough on a floured surface and continue to kneed & incorporate additional flour until they pass the windowpane test. Don't kneed too much otherwise the dough will loose its elasticity.
- Cover the 4 balls of dough with saran wrap and place them to the side (covering them is important, otherwise they'll dry and crack).
- Move your rack to the middle row, and turn your oven on to the highest temperature. Conventional ovens typically go up to 550 F - set it to that.
- Open your tomatoes and place them in a mixing bowl. Crush them with your hands until you get the consistency you want. Add salt to taste (around t tsp per 32 oz can).
- Place your additional ingredients (basil, mozarella, kalamata olves, pepperoni, etc) into separate mixing bowls, along with bench flour for making pies.
- After your oven's ready, and your dough has warmed up a bit, take a ball and place it on a floured surface. Kneed the dough with your hands (don't use a rolling pin - this will remove pockets of air and your pizza don't be fluffy and awesome) until you get the desired pizza shape.
- Move your pizza onto a cooking sheet, or corn-meal dusted pizza peel.
- Use a ladle and scoop pizza sauce (not too much!) onto your pizza, then drizzle a little olive oil (1-2 tbs-ish) over it.
- Take some basil, tear it apart, and place it on the pizza (tearring will open up the flavors). Break off pieces of mozzarella and place them on the pizza, following your ingredients.
- Place your pizza in the oven, and wait for ~7 minutes for it to fully cook. Check the bottom of the pizza for that - don't wait for the cheese to brown. Brown cheese = over-cooked pizza.
- Boom! You got delicious pizza.
- Don't cook two pizzas at once. They'll cook unevenly.
- If you have a pizza stone, place it on the top rack and run the broiler. Wait for the stone to get hot, then place the pizza in. This setup typically cooks pizzas in < 4 minutes, and you're left with something much more delicious.
- The longer it takes to cook the pizza, the more flavor that gets zapped from the ingredients (sauce primarily). You want your pizza to cook as quickly as possible. The real guys cook pies at 1000+ F for 90 seconds.
- adding some pepperoncinis (banana peppers) makes the pizza a bit more acidic, bringing out more punchy flavors.
- don't brush the pie dough with olive oil. This will inhibit the dough from rising in the oven. Drizzle with sauce instead, and stay away from drizzling the crust!
- don't use a rolling pin
- The best flavors come from some level of invariability. Try just throwing ingredients on the pizza instead of evenly placing things. See image above.
- 1 can of 32 oz tomatoes = 4 pizzas
- 3 cups of flour = 4 pizzas
- 3/1 ratio - 3 cups of flour to 1 cup of water.
- You can add the whole can of tomatoes, but remember that all the flavor comes from the san marzano plums that are in the tomato juice. I typically use just those, and throw away the juice (or use it for something else).
- Add salt to the tomato sauce a little before you're ready to start using it. After a while you should see the tomato juice separate from water a bit. Take a spoon and throw that water out. You should have slightly more viscous tomato sauce that's less likely to waterlog your pizza.
- Real pizza sauce only contains tomatos & salt. Don't taint it with anything else.
- Don't let your cold-rise dough rise for more than 3 days, otherwise it might get moldy.
- Cheese is done once it starts to bubble & melt. Don't let it get brown!
- If your cheese is done cooking before you dough is fully cooked, move the rack a bit lower (while the pizza is still cooking).