Pizza Napoletana 101 🍕
Four ingredients, time, and sufficient heat are the foundation of a good pizza. Of course, there are preferments like “poolish” or “biga,” 00 flours imported from Italy, and people who swear by heating their pizza ovens only with wood from old olive trees. These inputs make a difference, but with regular white flour from the supermarket, dry yeast, and enough time, you can get a pretty good pizza too.
This short guide is meant to serve as a starting point to step up your pizza game and surprise your friends and family with that airy crust and nice leoparding at the bottom of your pizza. I’ll give you some tips and tricks along the way, and for those who want to delve deeper into the subject, I’ll link videos and detailed guides.
The recipe #
Below is the recipe for four pizzas, each around 280g, which makes for a pizza with a diameter of roughly 30 cm. The proportions follow baker’s percentages. That is, each ingredient is expressed as a percentage of the flour weight used. This makes for easy scaling, gives you more control and precision, and allows you to easily adjust important parameters like hydration.
| Ingredient | Baker’s percentage |
|---|---|
| 700g Flour | 100% |
| 455g Water | 65% |
| 14g Salt | 2% |
| 2g Fresh yeast or 0.7g dry yeast | 0.3% |
This recipe is quite forgiving. With a 65% hydration, it still gives you a “moist” dough without making it too complicated to handle. There’s a nice saltiness to the dough without going overboard, and yes, you really only need this small amount of yeast. Let time be your friend and you’ll get an airy crust without any of that yeasty flavor that you often taste with fast-fermented products.
If you want to experiment with other proportions (e.g., 75% hydration) or need to adjust the amount of dough, there’s this handy calculator by Pieter Städler: https://www.stadlermade.com/pizza-calculator/ Beware, the default proportions for the salt and the yeast are not the same!
A Quick Guide on the Ingredients #
Flour #
You’ll see that many recipes call for 00 flour. 00 or “doppio zero” refers to the grind size according to the Italian classification system. In Germany, equivalents would be T405/T550, whereas in France, it would be T45. Very often, though, you’ll just find regular white flour, and that’s perfectly fine. 00’s very fine texture makes for a really smooth dough, and its low enzymatic activity helps with baking at high temperatures, but your regular supermarket flour will do just fine. However, I encourage you to support your local farmers and buy local white flour.
Deep dive links
Water #
It doesn’t have to be decalcified, demineralized, or anything else. Tap water is perfectly fine. However, its temperature plays a very important role when making your dough. More on that later.
Salt #
Regular table salt is perfectly fine. Apart from salt giving flavor to the dough, it has some interesting properties: It interacts with the yeast and slows down its enzymatic activity, meaning the conversion of sugars to carbon dioxide and ethyl alcohol. This prolongs the fermentation time and creates more complex flavors. Besides, salt strengthens the gluten network, thus increasing the stability of the dough, which in turn leads to a nice airy dough that traps all the CO2.
Deep dive links
- https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2020/07/29/why-is-salt-important-in-yeast-bread
- https://breadscience.weebly.com/salt–gluten.html
Yeast #
You can use either fresh or dry yeast, just make sure to adjust your proportions accordingly. Dry yeast has a higher concentration of yeast cells and can have a stronger leavening power. That’s why a rule of thumb is to use a third of fresh yeast’s weight when using dry yeast.
And yes, you can mix salt and yeast directly together. However, the statement that “salt kills yeast” is not completely false. In the words of Dr. Blonder (author of the linked article below), salt is a widely used preservative, quickly drying out microbes and disrupting cell membranes, meaning that you should limit direct contact between yeast and salt when preparing your dough.
Deep dive links
- https://genuineideas.com/ArticlesIndex/saltyeast.html
- https://www.pizzablab.com/learning-and-resources/ingredients/guide-to-yeast/
Preparing the Dough #
Let’s prepare the dough! I use a kneading machine for this, but all the steps also apply if you prepare the dough by hand. It just gets a little messier.
- Put the flour and the dry yeast into a bowl. Stir briefly to mix the two ingredients.
- Add all the water. Recipes often recommend adding the water gradually or adding almost all at the beginning and then adding the rest at the very end, but in my experience, the “all at once” method works just as well. Knead everything for about 5 minutes. At the end, all the flour should now be hydrated, meaning it should form a coherent dough. Your dough should still feel sticky and “rough.”
- Now add the salt. Don’t worry if the dough suddenly becomes softer again. I couldn’t find out the exact reason for this (seems to have something to do with the inhibiting effect of salt), but there’s no need to worry. Just keep kneading for another five minutes or until the dough is a nice smooth mass. Finally, form a big ball. If your dough doesn’t look smooth yet, no need to worry! Leave the big pizza ball under a kitchen bowl or a damp cloth (just so it doesn’t dry out) for another 10 minutes. Knead it a few times, and you’ll see, this works wonders. Repeat this step until you have a smooth ball of dough.
- Now place the dough ball in an oiled (makes it easier to take the dough out again afterward) container that you can seal airtight, so that the dough doesn’t dry out. Do yourself a favor and use a large enough container so that the dough can expand nicely. I’ve had my dough overflow too many times in the fridge… However, the dough doesn’t go into the fridge yet! Leave it in the container on the kitchen counter for 1-2 hours (depending on the temperature) to activate the yeast. After 1-2 hours, you will see that the dough has become smoother and more relaxed, i.e., it has lost its shape. Now take the relaxed dough ball out of the container, form it into a tight ball again to strengthen the dough once again, and put the ball back into the same oiled container. Optionally, cover the dough with a damp cloth before closing the container to ensure that the dough does not dry out in the fridge. Now put it in the fridge (5-7 degrees Celsius) for 16-19 hours.
- The next day, portion the dough into balls of 280g each. Depending on how wet your dough is, you can work it straight from the fridge or wait 30 minutes to make it easier to shape.
- Now place the shaped dough balls in a container sprinkled with flour or durum wheat flour/semolina to make it easier to remove the balls. Place the balls in the container so that they are three to four fingers apart. Now you can close the container and let the dough rise again for at least 2 hours before you bake the pizza.
- Time to bake the pizzas! Heat your oven to the maximum temperature and, if available, choose the top and bottom heat setting instead of convection. This way, the dough dries out less quickly in the oven.
How exactly to stretch the dough, how to prepare the tomato sauce (tip: 1g salt per 100g tomato sauce), and which mozzarella to use is beyond the scope of this guide (at least for now). However, the videos linked offer very good advice and show you different techniques for stretching the pizza dough. No matter how you do it, keep one rule in mind: “Never touch the border!”
Buon appetito!