Pizza margherita

Three toppings and a dough with four ingredients. The difficulty is not the recipe, it is the oven: a Neapolitan pizza cooks in 60 to 90 seconds at around 450C, and a domestic oven reaches roughly half that. Everything below is about closing that gap rather than pretending it is not there.

Ingredients

Makes 4 pizzas of about 250 g each.

Dough

	Metric	Imperial
Strong white flour, ideally tipo 00	1 kg	2.2 lb
Water	620 ml	21 fl oz
Fine salt	25 g	0.9 oz
Fresh yeast	2 g	0.07 oz

Topping, per pizza

	Metric	Imperial
Peeled tomatoes, crushed by hand, unsalted	80 g	3 oz
Fiordilatte or mozzarella, torn and drained	70 g	2.5 oz
Basil	3 leaves	3 leaves
Olive oil	a thread	a thread

Two grams of yeast for a kilo of flour looks like a typo and is not. The dough rises slowly, over 8 to 24 hours, and that slowness is where the flavour comes from.

Method

1. Dissolve the salt in the water, add about a tenth of the flour, then the yeast, then the rest of the flour gradually. Mix until it comes together and knead 10 minutes until smooth.
2. Rest covered at room temperature 2 hours, then divide into balls and rest a further 6 to 22 hours. Cool room, not the fridge, if you can.
3. Drain the torn mozzarella in a sieve for at least an hour. Salt the tomato only when you dress the pizza.
4. Heat the oven as high as it goes, with a steel or stone on the top shelf, for a full hour. Not twenty minutes. The stone needs the whole time.
5. Open a ball by pressing from the centre outwards with your fingertips, leaving the outer 2 cm untouched. Never a rolling pin: it crushes the gas out of the rim.
6. Dress it: tomato, then cheese, then oil. Basil goes on before baking in Naples and survives better tucked under the cheese.
7. Bake on the stone, then finish under the top grill for the last 60 seconds to colour the rim.

What goes wrong

The base is pale and biscuity. The stone was not hot enough or not preheated long enough. This is the single most common home failure.

The middle is soupy. Wet mozzarella, or tomato salted too early and left to weep. Drain one, salt the other last.

The rim is flat. Rolled instead of hand-opened, or the dough was cold. A rim puffs because gas is trapped in it.

It sticks to the peel. Too much hesitation. Dress fast and launch fast; a dressed pizza starts sticking within about a minute.

Why it works

A long slow rise with very little yeast lets enzymes break starch into sugars without the dough over-inflating. Those sugars are what brown at high heat in under two minutes, which is why a fast-risen dough stays pale no matter how hot the oven. The heat has to come from below through a mass hot enough to cook the base before the toppings dry out, which is what the stone is for.

At the table

A whole pizza, one person, no sharing. This is the part that catches visitors hardest. An Italian pizza is a single course for a single diner, it arrives uncut in Naples and cut in Rome, and you work through it with a knife and fork or fold it, but you do not put it in the middle for the table.

It is an evening meal and a cheap one, eaten in a pizzeria rather than a restaurant, often late, often loudly. It is not a primo and nothing follows it except possibly a dolce.

The drink is beer or a fizzy soft drink. Wine with pizza is not wrong but it is noticeably less common, and nobody orders anything serious.

The margherita is the reference point on any menu, and ordering it is how Italians judge a new pizzeria: there is nothing on it to hide behind. A place that does the margherita well is trusted with everything else.

Pineapple is a joke people are tired of. Ordering it will not get you thrown out, but the waiter's face is the answer.

What an Italian would say

That the mozzarella is fiordilatte for a home oven and mozzarella di bufala for a proper one, because buffalo milk releases much more water. That the tomato is crushed by hand and never cooked first. And that a pizza cut with scissors into a box is a different food from one eaten with a knife and fork off a plate, and both are fine.