Neapolitan-Style Pizza You Can Master

And then I'll show you how to eat it. I'll show you how to spill it all over my clothes. Hey folks, Martin here in the studio today making our Neapolitan style pizza crust. We're using double zero flour. It's tender but it puffs well in the oven. It gives us that classic Neapolitan edge crust. Let's make some pizzas. So let's do the mix. There are two things though that I want to just note before I start. First is that I'm using double zero pizza flour. This is flour that is specifically milled and designed to be used for pizza making. You can also use it for focaccia and some other things too. This is a white flour similar to All Purpose but with an even finer milling producing a tender crisp crust. I love double zero for making pizza. Check it out. But if you don't have it, All Purpose is an okay substitute. All right, the second thing is just to note about the timing of the recipe. This is one of those recipes where you mix on day one and you bake on day two. You mix the dough, it ferments overnight, and then you divide, round, shape, and bake on day two. And the reason for that is that with time comes flavor. Time is the secret ingredient in all bread dough. It's not on the label but it's in the flavor. It takes time to make really good delicious dough. So try the flour and I hope you like this method. So let's get to the mix. And as always, all of the recipe is down there in the link below. Check it out, look around, you'll find it. So double zero in the bowl, a very small amount of yeast. Because this dough ferments for 12 to 24 hours, it's just a very small amount, one-eighth of a teaspoon. And then we've got a half teaspoon of sugar. The sugar will help with a little bit of extra browning for the crust. And then some salt because everything is better with salt. Salt also has a functional role in the bread dough environment. It controls fermentation a little bit. Without the salt, the yeast move more quickly. The dough rises more quickly. It develops less strength. So make sure the salt's in there. I'll stir those briefly to combine. This water is lukewarm. But in the summer, if your kitchen is hot, you may not need to warm it up. In the winter, if your kitchen is really cool, then definitely use lukewarm. It will make a difference. And then you just stir to combine. This is a soft dough, okay? It's a pretty soft dough. We want that because this soft dough is going to help us have a nice puffy edge crust when we bake it. You're not going to get this out on the counter to knead it. You are just pressing, turning, pressing, making sure that it's well combined. And that's it. Pizza dough's done. Literally. So easy. And now we're going to cover it and we're going to let it rest for 12 to 24 hours. And then we'll go to the divide, shape, and bake. So this is the dough that I mixed yesterday evening. It's had a little bit over 12 hours. Probably going on like maybe 16 hours, something like that. You take the cover off a dough like this and I immediately smell something that you might perceive as like bread flavoring. Or it smells like bread. When you take the lid off, it smells yeasty. It smells active. And that's why we have that long fermentation process is because it develops flavor. The only way to get that flavor is through time. You can't shortcut it. So let's divide it and put a little bit of flour on top. And then with my flexible scraper, I just go in and sort of release the dough from the bowl. You can see that the dough has a dry side, which was floured. The floury side was just touching the bench. And then the top side, which is pretty sticky. If I touch it with my hand, it's going to stick. So a little bit of flour on the top side. And then we can divide two equal pieces. If you feel like just eyeballing it, you can do that. Just cut it in two. Or if you want to measure it and get them really accurate, it's about 200 grams a piece. This dough is very relaxed. It's soft. And so you're not going to want to overhandle it. It's going to stick to you. So let me show you. I'm just going to fold it a little bit and fold the sides to the middle. I'm going to turn it. Fold the sides to the middle. And then I'll just bring the corners in to make it a little bit more of a round form because we want the pizza to be round, right? So just round it a little bit. It's good to go. Done. This is 200 grams. It's a good size for the home oven. And that's often what people will do in restaurants too for, say, a 9 or 10 inch pizza in diameter, 200 to 225 or 250 grams. So we're going to give these a little bit of a rest and then we'll come back and bake them. The dough has rested probably 45 minutes. Could have been an hour. May have been a little bit longer. So from this point on, I'm going to be relatively gentle with the pizza. I'm going to press it into shape, stretch it a little bit. We'll put it on the peel and we'll top it and load it. In order to shape it, I'm going to start just inside this sort of edge crust. I'm looking at the edge of this piece of dough and I kind of don't want to touch that because I want the pizza to have a little bit of a handle crust, a little bit of an edge crust to it. So I move to the middle of the dough and I'm just going to press. And I'm leaving about maybe a half inch border, maybe a little bit less. And a lot of the work of this shaping is going to be done just by pressing. I don't need to pick it up. I don't need to do anything else. So I would say I'm about like two thirds of the way there right now. And I'm just going to make sure that it's not adhered to the bench. And then if I feel like it needs a little bit more, I can come back. And just on the back of my hand, using the weight of the dough, I'll just let it stretch some. So I'm just letting it stretch. As I handle the dough, I'm avoiding that edge crust. You'll see that my fingers are just inside that edge. I'm not grabbing it by the edge proper. And that's because, like I said, in this Neapolitan style of pizza making, we want to have a little bit of a puffy edge crust. And so I'm just gently stretching until I feel like I have a round that's in the, you know, 10 to 12 inch range, something like that. And that's pretty good. My preference for loading pizza is on a wooden peel. A dough won't stick to this as easily as it will to the metal to a certain degree. Metal is great for unloading. But my preference is to load off wood and then unload with metal. That's just me. The second thing I want to talk about is how you sort of prepare the peel. Now, you could use semolina here or you could use flour. Just don't use too much of either, OK? Because anything that's extra will end up on your baking stone or steel and it'll just burn, OK? So use just enough, but not too much. That's a tough sort of line to find. But with experience, you'll sort that out. I'm going to put this little round of parchment onto my wooden peel. The parchment will help you get the pizza off the peel onto the stone more easily. If you're new to pizza and you're new to sort of loading and how that pizza launch goes, I would recommend parchment. And we're ready to top. I've got some toppings here. Once you have the dough on the peel, the clock is ticking. You want to be mindful of not letting this dough rest on the peel for too long because it will stick. If you leave it, it will stick. And everybody knows how well a stuck dough slides into the oven. It causes a lot of problems. I've got a good video on some tips for loading pizza. Be sure to check that out. It's part of your learning. So let's start with just a basic pie. A little bit of tomato, a little bit of cheese. I like to think of pizza as sort of garnished dough. It's dough with a garnish on it. So, you know, be gentle with the toppings. Don't go too heavy. Let that delicious dough shine. And then I've got a little bit of a garlic oil. This is just fresh garlic with a little bit of olive oil and a pinch of salt. That's all it is. I'll do one more jiggle. Are we good? Yep, let's load. This is a good bake. I like a bake that has a pie where it doesn't sort of get floppy on you. You know, the Neapolitan style will have a more droopy tip to it, which is fine. And that's sort of normal for the style, as opposed to like a New York style, which has that no dip tip, as they say. But we'll let this sit for just a second. If you have some basil and you want to add some of that, this would be the time to do it. The hallmark of this Neapolitan style is a puffy open edge crust, right? Because of the way we handled it and because of the good flour, because of the hot oven, we've achieved that. So it's hot, it's like super hot. It's pretty warm. If you take the time to make a good crust, people will actually eat it because it's flavorful. It's got so much flavor from that long fermentation. The sauce is really good. Good cheese on there. The garlic's coming through. The beauty of pizza is that it's a good bread dough topped with delicious toppings. You can do anything from this mushroom pie with a hot pepper sauce to a classic margarita with a little bit of basil tomato sauce. Everything is delicious. I love this pizza flour. I love the way the edge crust puffs. Y'all get out there and make some pizza. This is our Neapolitan style pizza crust, long fermented, delicious. Hey, thanks for joining us. Be well. Happy baking. Hey bakers, Martin here in the studio today and we just wrapped filming a homemade pizza class. This is a class that you can sign up for and watch whenever you want as many times as you like. We've got several recipes and lots of tools, tricks, methods, everything from oven management to shaping and even tabletop pizza ovens. Sign up below and join us. I'll see you there.