Homemade Italian Pizza: Homemade Pizza

"I don't have a recipe for happiness, but I have a recipe for pizza which is pretty close..."

I want to share with you a pizza recipe that I have been refining over many years.

Keep in mind that a good pizza needs at least 8 hours of proofing, but I would recommend extending it to 24h, to develop greater flavor and a more digestible though. There are shorter recipes that claim that pizza can be prepared in less than 2 hours, in reality these will produce something similar to a Focaccia. That's not we are after.

This is what we are after:

So here you have two options:

Option 1: Quick version

For those in a hurry, I recommend 8 hours of proofing as you can prepare the dough in the morning and have it ready for dinner,

When you cut it doesn't really affect the results too much as long as it's not too early and it's not too late.

Option 2: Fridge version

Ingredients dough

(2 pizzas):

400 g of flour
300 ml of water
1g of dry yeast (2 for the fast version)
1 teaspoon of sugar
2 table spoon of extra-virgin olive oil.
8g of salt

Ingredients for the topping:

1 can of peeled tomatoes
Half teaspoon of salt
black pepper
6 leaves of fresh basil
2 mozzarellas

Preparing the dough

You need strong flour. You can identify strong flour by checking the proteins in the nutrition table. Look for 12g per 100g or more.

Put 1g of dry yeast and one teaspooon of sugar in a bowl add 125ml of water

Pour the remaining 150ml of water in a cup together with 2 tablespoons of oil and 8g of salt

and wait for about 5m

start adding the flour to the yeast...

add the water with salt and oil

Keep adding flour gradually and mix together with a wooden spoon until the dough gets solid.

Important: Don't use all the flour and don't add it all at once.

It took me a long time to understand how to manage a dough with such a high hydration rate (75%). The trick is that you cover it with flour just briefly during the kneading, (which you'll find out it's not that much) it will get absorbed and return sticky, but you won't have to touch it again.

Now let it rest for 30m.

What happened?! Magic.

You haven't done any kneading and yet the dough has developed gluten, becoming a smoother, more extensible. Cover it with some of the remaining flour and you should be able to grab it with your hands for few minutes.

You can knead it to increase its elasticity as shown below.

If it gets sticky add flour, and keep streching it but don't overdo it. Just a couple of minutes.

Let the dough rest for 3 hours in a closed container

After 3 hours you can cut it in two .

Wait 5 more hours keeping the dough in in two separate containers this time .

Make sure that these containers are sealed

Prepare the topping:

(Note: you can do this part few hours in advance, so that the sauce is properly seasoned and mozzarella has drained some water.)

Mash the tomatoes and collect all the tomato sauce; there will be a good amount of raw tomato passata in each can, that's what we are looking for, leave the tomato chunks aside. 1 can is enough for 2 pizzas.

Add 1 tb spoon of olive oil, half teaspoon of salt, fresh basil and black pepper..

Don't dice mozzarella, tear it instead. Leave some big chunks and keep it in the fridge until the moment before pizza goes in the oven

After 5h when the dough is ready warm up the oven...

The oven temperature is really important.

You should bake pizza in just 7-10 minutes, so the oven needs to be HOT

"....and by hot I mean hotter than the blazes of hell and damnation itself"

. It's likely that your electric oven is not hot enough but here is what you can do: wait until it gets to max temperature, keep the tray in the upper section, (this will reduce the air volume, keeping pizza closer to the heating element on the top) and turn on the grill function if there is one. To improve results you can buy a pizza stone like this one; the stone retains heat and distributes it evenly. If you are considering getting a stone you might want to search a short pizza peel as well so that you can move it in and out. Careful, never take the stone out when is hot, it will crack by thermal shock.

Now you have to stretch the dough.
Here some tips on how to get the dough out of the bowl:

cover the table with some of the remaining flour
flip the container upside down
wait until it gently falls down.

Don't use rolling pins!

The gas inside the dough must not escape from the crust.

To make sure most of the gas remains inside press only in the center, spin it, pull it, stretch it. It needs to get thin in the center without tearing. It might take some time to get used to this. If it's still too wet or elastic cover it with flour but remove the excess before baking.