Pizza margherita

Ingredients

• Type 00 flour500 g
• Water330 ml
• Fresh yeast1 g
• Salt for the dough12 g
• San Marzano tomatoes400 g
• Fior di latte mozzarella — sliced and drained300 g
• Basil20 g
• Olive oil4 tbsp

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Dissolve the yeast in the water, add the flour and mix to a rough dough. Rest it twenty minutes, then work in the salt and knead ten minutes to a smooth ball.

   35 min

2. 2

   Leave it two hours at room temperature, divide it into four balls and refrigerate for a day.

   1440 min

3. 3

   Take the dough out three hours before baking. Crush the tomatoes by hand with a pinch of salt: the sauce is done.

   180 min

4. 4

   Heat the oven with a stone or steel at full power for at least an hour. It takes longer than seems necessary and it is not optional.

   60 min

5. 5

   Stretch a ball with your fingers from the centre outwards, leaving the rim untouched. No rolling pin: it drives the air out of the rim and the crust will not rise.

   5 min

6. 6

   Spread a thin layer of sauce, lay on the mozzarella and trickle over the oil. Bake seven to nine minutes, until the rim is spotted, and add the basil to the finished pizza.

   9 min

About the dish

Neapolitan dough ferments for twenty-four to forty-eight hours on a minimum of yeast. In that time it develops a flavour a two-hour prove never gives — a fast rise simply inflates the dough without changing it.

The sauce is not cooked. San Marzano tomatoes are crushed by hand with salt, and that is all. Cooking kills the freshness the sauce exists for; it finishes on the pizza itself.

A domestic oven reaches 250-280 °C, a Neapolitan one 450 °C. The gap is closed with steel or stone heated for an hour: it gives heat from below faster than the air gives it from above.

Worth knowing

• — Drain the mozzarella on paper for half an hour without fail. Otherwise it releases water and the middle stays wet.
• — The basil goes on after the oven. Inside it blackens within a minute and turns bitter.
• — Sixty-five per cent hydration suits a home oven. Wetter and the dough sticks and needs skill; drier and the crust comes out hard.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

720 kcal

Protein

30 g

Fat

26 g

Carbs

92 g

Useful for this recipe

• Oven Temperature Converter

More from Italy

• Spaghetti carbonara — Pasta from four ingredients: guanciale, eggs, pecorino and pepper. There is no cream in it and never was.
• Risotto alla milanese — A saffron risotto built on stock and near-constant stirring, which is what pulls the starch out of the rice and makes it creamy.
• Pesto alla genovese — Basil ground with garlic and pine nuts. No heat and no blender — a mortar and a cool room.