Hi I'm Simone! This recipe was developed based on some tips I acquired over time from lots and lots of resources and tutorials like youtube videos, family and friends recipes. I'm just an amateur who likes making pizza :)
If you plan to perfectionate your pizza making skills, I suggest to come up with your own recipe and research online watching lots of tutorials and different techniques. For now the following recipe is the one that works for me!
(I'm not a professional pizzaiolo and I never had any sort of experience in a professional pizzeria restaurant)
The Ingredients you need for this recipes are the following:
My typical quantities are for 4 pizza "Panielli" and 24 hours fermentation:
- 708gr of strong white flour (usually I get one with 12.5g proteins)
- 460gr of water
- 23gr of salt
- 9gr of oil
- 0.61gr of fresh yeast (if you're doing a 8h fermentation time then change this to 1,53g)
- 1 teaspoon of sugar
- To convert from fresh yeast to active dry yeast, multiply the fresh quantity by 1/3. Active dry yeast must be hydrated in warm water before being incorporated into a dough.
- To activate dry yeast this is what I do: place the yeast in a little cup, add half a teaspoon of sugar, two and half teaspoon of lukewarm water and mix until it's completely absorbed. Then leave it to rest for 15 mins before using it.
- keep in mind that in order to do a long fermentation dough you will need a strong flour this means higher number of proteins, otherwise the dough won't resist the fermentation and when stretching it will easily break!
You can use the following web app to calculate the quantities (translate the website to English using google translate):
https://www.laconfraternitadellapizza.net/calcolapizza
Alternatively you can also use this Android application!
This is an example of my quantities:
(If you want to make more than 4 pizzas simply change number of panielli in the web app)
The dough preparation time should not exceed 20 mins and typically is made in 15/20 minutes of time.
- Place in a bowl the quantity of warm water you need. The temperature should be not too hot, not too cold. You should be able to keep your fingers in the water.
- In a different bowl put all the flour you need and that you previously calculated the quantity. (Keep in mind youโre going to need two separate bowls, or containers, one for the water and one for the flour).
- Get the yeast and melt it in the warm water with your hands. The yeast should turn the water to a whiteish milky color.
- You can put the teaspoon of sugar right after the yeast has melted.
- In the container with flour you should flatten the flour by moving the container up and down in order to create a flat surface in the bowl. Now with a spoon make a line which should separate the flour in a half (should correspond to the diameter of the bowl). Youโll see later on why we need to separate the two half.
- With a spoon start to get the first half of the flour and slowly put it in the warm water spoon by spoon. The flour should fall into the warm water as if youโre "making it rain" from the top :) You should mix the flour and the warm water really well in order to remove all possible lumps of flour inside the water. Donโt be too fast while youโre doing this first process! But be sure the flour and the water is well mixed!
- Once the first half of the bowl with flour is finished you can put the salt all in one go and continue mixing. The dough will be very hard to stretch after this step because the gluten net will start to form and will be quite sticky and elastic. Make sure to always have one hand free otherwise will be hard with both hands dirty. (You can ask someone to help you with the other ingredients).
- Wait a bit before starting with the other half of the flour. Make sure the salt is well absorbed by the dough! You can then proceed with the other half of the flour until thereโs a few teaspoons of flour left in the bowl. You can watch this video on how to knead the dough (inside the bowl) in order to trap all the oxygen and air inside the dough. https://youtu.be/k29NzHyHXOc?t=574
- When the dough feels not too liquid anymore you can put the olive oil and continue mixing.
- You can start to knead the dough on a flat surface outside the bowl when you feel like the dough has absorbed the olive oil and the dough feels very solid. You can watch the following video on how to knead the dough on a table: https://youtu.be/Bi3L7wtmaHA?t=356
- Put few remaining teaspoons of flour to make it more dry. If you feel like the dough is still too wet and sticky put a bit more flour to reduce the hydration but do not exaggerate with the extra flour, the dough should still be a bit sticky. Up until now the process should last max 20 minutes and I suggest not to knead the dough more than that!
- After this process you can form a big dough ball and leave it to rest on the table for 30 minutes covered with a dry cloth.
- After 30 minutes the surface of the dough will still be a bit wrinkled. So now we have to make the surface smooth and elastic. You continue watching that last video I linked to the minute 7:26 https://youtu.be/Bi3L7wtmaHA?t=443 to see how to achieve this. Once you created a new dough ball which will be smoother than the last time you can leave it rest for another 5 minutes (always covered).
- After this last step the surface of the dough should be very smooth and elastic. If it looks still too wrinkled repeat the process another time. But do not exaggerate! Is still ok if itโs not too smooth especially the first few times you do this ;)
We will now create smaller dough balls starting from a big dough that we finished kneading. If the original calculations are correct each dough ball should weight around 280-300gr. The name of this process is called in Italian โstagliaturaโ or โpezzaturaโ.
- Before cutting the dough make a big โsnakeโ shaped dough ball on the table.
- With a knife or a dough cutter cut a piece of dough and weight it in order to achieve the weight mentioned before.
- After you weighted each dough ball you can start to create the actual ball by folding and closing the dough as a "mozzarella" shaped ball. Watch the following video on how to form the dough balls at the minute 9:58: https://youtu.be/Bi3L7wtmaHA?t=598
- Place the dough balls in a container and cover them with some cling film in order to prevent the oxygen from going in contact with the dough. This is really important because otherwise the dough ball can get dry on the top and very hard to stretch after the fermentation! You can also use Tupperware containers to ferment each dough separately. Alternatively you can also put each dough ball (well distanced between each other) on a big baking tray and cover everything with a cling film.
The typical fermentation time for a Neapolitan pizza should go from 6 to 8 hours. Personally I like the 24h fermentation (always outside of the fridge). This recipe does not include the fermentation inside the fridge but there are lots of tutorials online if you want to do that!
As mentioned before remember that in order to have a long fermentation (such as 24h in my case) you will need strong flours which means they should contain a high number of proteins (typically around 12.5 or above). When working with 00 or 0 types of flour I suggest a fermentation which goes from 6h up to 8h max!
Itโs hard to describe by words how to stretch a pizza so Iโll include here some very great tutorials on how to stretch a pizza.
- I usually stretch the pizza by placing the fermented dough ball in some semolina flour, so that it wonโt stick on the surface where youโre stretching your pizza! The semolina flour is usually yellowish coloured flour.
- After you โbatheโ the dough ball in the semolina flour (the surface of the dough ball should not be sticky anymore after this process) put the dough ball on a table and you can start the stretching.
One thing I can say is after the fermentation the dough will be full of air and oxygen inside. To achieve the famous big crust shaped pizza you will need to push the air from the inside to the outside (crust) of the dough!
- The following video is in Italian but is great because he shows the famous technique called โschiaffoโ, which is the best technique for stretching a pizza! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiCtxhwHoKQ When watching this video stop watching at the minute 3:30 because after that he explains how to remove the crust (and we donโt want that!!!) (or if you want that just keep watching, up to ye!)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px9QTkPu2pE (this is another video always in Italian. In this video youโll see many stretching techniques other than the โschiaffoโ)
- Another great video by Davide Civitiello on how to stretch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq90lUQUCUo&feature=youtu.be&t=524 watch the video at the minute 8:46.
Once the pizza has been stretched leave it on the table so we can start to put all the toppings according to your own preferences. The base toppings for a good pizza usually are the ones of a Margherita. If you're learning how to make pizza, start simple and learn how to make a plain Margherita first!
My base toppings are:
- Tomato sauce
- Grated Parmesan cheese
- Extra virgin olive oil
- Mozzarella "fior di latte" (make sure to dry the mozzarella in the fridge before using it otherwise it's going to release a lot of water during cooking in the oven).
- Fresh Basil
To cook a pizza in a regular home oven you can use a pizza stone to achieve a better baking result!
The pizza stone should be placed in the oven and pre heat the oven (with the pizza stone inside) for 45 minutes. The temperature of the oven should be at the maximum temperature. Usually home ovens donโt go go above 300ยฐC, but the higher the better.
Is also great to bake the pizza using the โgrill functionalityโ if itโs available in your oven.
If you donโt have a pizza stone a normal cooking tray/tin is also fine. Just make sure the pizza is well cooked.
The cooking time for a 300ยฐC home oven should be around 5/6 minutes while for lower temperatures it might require longer even up to 15 minutes.
- Get two cans of plum peeled tomatoes and put them in a bowl you should put just the tomato and you should avoid putting the extra juice you usually find already in the can
- Now with just your hand make the tomato as a juice and squeeze them, the sauce shouldnโt be too liquid but should contain also little pieces of tomatoes (otherwise the liquid is going to evaporate in the oven when you cook it).
- Add 1 and half teaspoon of sugar
- Add 1 teaspoon and a half of salt
- Add 1 and a half teaspoon of extra virgin olive oil
- This is going to be weird but is good... add just a little bit milk like 1 or two teaspoon to remove the acidity of the tomato
- Add 4 leaves of basil (better if you break them with your hands)
Professoinal pizzaiuoli and youtube channels/videos that got me inspired:
- Vito Iacopelli
- Gigi Attanasio
- Vincenzo Viscusi
- Marco Savina
- Davide Civitiello
- Gino Sorbillo
- Enzo Coccia
- Frank Pinello
๐ธ All my pizza attempts are available on the following Flickr album
โน๏ธ The comments below are from an easter egg I put on my website ;)
I learned how to beat Cestino using github and ctrl-f rather than by messing with the page, but it was fun nonetheless :)