Bring Italy to Your Kitchen: Margherita Pizza Recipe

Unfortunately, I’ve never been to Italy to try a true Napoletana pizza. Let me tell you that it’s definitely a dream of mine, though! When I can finally travel to Italy and explore all the lovely food (yes, and sights too!), I’ll let you know my thoughts! BUT I’ve made probably hundreds of pizzas in the past seven years or so! I’ve learned a lot from The Pizza Bible by Tony Gemignani, and on a quest to try all the doughs and pizzas cover to cover (this mission hasn’t been completed yet!), stumbling across the Napoletana dough has really changed my life, and these are my favorite pizzas to make!

To be honest with you, the big seller for me about a Napoletana pizza is the fast cook time! It only bakes in the oven for about three minutes! Yes, you read that right! I also love the lovely browning of the crust, and the perfect taste and crispiness and chewiness. Everything about a Neapolitan pizza is just fabulous!

And no, you don’t need a pizza oven to make Napoletana pizza! That’s what this recipe is for you! I’ll show you how to achieve a perfect Neapolitan pizza right at home so you can bring Italy to your kitchen tonight! You won’t need any fancy equipment or niche ingredients. Furthermore, this Homemade Margherita Pizza recipe also features my Quick Homemade Napoletana Pizza Dough. The idea behind this dough is to get a quick dough ready in an hour that will give you incredible results!

If you check out the traditional Napoletana Pizza Dough featured in The Pizza Bible, you’ll see that it requires a starter, called a “poolish.” The poolish is a mixture of yeast and water, and this needs 18 hours to rest. Then, you’ll add it to your dough mixture, and the dough takes another 24 to 36 hours to rise.

It’s not a difficult process but requires patience. Let me tell you that I’m the master of last-minute dinner decisions, so if at 5 pm that evening I decide to have a pizza, I’ll want to have a pizza! This recipe is the perfect solution if you’re just like me!

To show you the baking method, I’ll use a classic Margherita. Who doesn’t love a Margherita? A Neapolitan pizza is such a great example of letting simplicity shine!

I’ll be totally honest and admit that this was my first time actually making a true Margherita. I’ve made Margherita pizzas before, but I used part-skim mozzarella cheese in the form of a ball or block. At long last, I finally used the fresh cow mozzarella to really make it authentic. That cheese is totally worth it and I recommend you use it! I’ll tell you more about this cheese, so be sure to read on!

Equipment for Homemade Margherita Pizza

Let’s review the equipment that I highly recommend you invest in to make a great pizza at home. It may seem like a lot, but I definitely believe that if you’re serious about making great pizzas at home, it will be worth every penny to have these items in your collection. The cost of investing in some great equipment to make a lifetime of pizzas at home will certainly be significantly less than if you ordered a pizza every week!

The idea behind using the baking stones or steels is to go beyond what a conventional home oven can offer. A napoletana pizza is usually made in a wood-fired oven, burning hot at 900F. By using the baking steels and stones to preheat at the highest setting the oven can offer, allows the oven to get even hotter as the stone and steel retain the heat and radiate it back.

It’s the next best thing if you don’t a wood-fired oven.

Next essential item is a pizza peel. I have both a wooden peel and a metal peel. The wooden peel is great to form the pizza and then transfer the pizza to the hot baking steel or stone. If you are following the baking steel/stone method, this is something you need, to ensure the safety of yourself and your pizza.

Another handy tool is a bench scraper. This is very useful to efficiently portion your dough and clean your workspace after a fun hour of kneading.

Finally, a pizza wheel cutter is always useful to cut your pizza into perfect slices! Plus, it’s so much fun to use! You may already have this, but it’s worth mentioning if you don’t! Using a knife just won’t give you the same results.

Tips for the Best Margherita Napoletana Pizza

• Invest in a baking steel or baking stone. They are cheap, and an essential tool if you are serious about your pizza.
• Make sure to preheat the oven at the highest temperature your oven can reach for at least 1 hour.
• Use a pair of baking steels/stones if possible, setting up one of them towards the top rack of the oven and the second one at the bottom.
• 10 minutes before baking the pizza, set the oven to broil mode to make the top steel/stone scorching hot. This will help rapidly cook the crispy crust.
• To finish up the crust, transfer the pizza to the bottom stone/steel to finish up the crust.
• The tomato sauce is a no-cook sauce which actually finishes cooking on the pizza itself. The sauce for a Napoletana is traditionally a thin sauce, so try not to flood the pizza with sauce.
• We are using Fior di latte which usually has 60% moisture. Before adding to the pizza, try to squeeze some of the water out to avoid a water pizza.
• Let the pizza cool slightly before adding the basil, to make sure the leaves stay green.

## Ingredients for Homemade Napoletana Margherita

Let’s go over what we’ll need to make our amazing Homemade Neapolitan Margherita!

• 460g 00 flour
• 8g Quick rise yeast
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/4 Cup lukewarm water (60-70F) + ~200 g/mL lukewarm water (60-70F)

Full recipe for the Quick Homemade Pizza Napoletana Dough.

## How to Make Pizza Margherita Napoletana

1. Place one baking steel/stone on the second highest rack of the oven and another one at the bottom most rack. Preheat oven at 500 F for 1 hour.
2. Dust your countertop with flour and starting with one portion of dough at a time, add the dough ball over the flour. Starting from the center of the dough, press down on the dough and create a rim around the side.
3. Continue pressing down the center to stretch the dough. Then, hold the dough from the rim and rotate to let gravity stretch it further. You can also use knuckles to stretch the dough, until the diameter is about 10 inches.
4. Set oven to Broil mode, let top steel/stone heat for 8-10 minutes.
5. Dust a wooden pizza peel with semolina and place the stretched dough on the peel.
6. Add 3-4 Tbsp of the tomato sauce and spread until the edge of the pizza. Tear layers of the fior di latte and dot 5-6 slices around the pizza.
7. In a swift push and pull motion, place the pizza on the top baking steel/stone.
8. Bake for 1 1/2 - 2 minutes or until the crust has some char or brown spots and the cheese is molten.
9. Then transfer the pizza to the bottom steel/stone to finish off the crust of the pizza, about 30 seconds to 1 minute.
10. Remove the pizza from the oven and top with parmesan cheese, brush the crust with olive oil and add fresh basil. Serve hot!

The Three Ingredients That Make a Margherita

A Margherita has nowhere to hide. There is no pepperoni to cover a dull sauce and no pile of toppings to distract from a flabby crust, which is exactly why high-quality ingredients matter more here than on any other pizza. Three things carry the whole thing:

• The tomatoes. This is a no-cook tomato sauce that finishes cooking on the pizza itself, so the tomatoes go on essentially raw and their quality is what you taste. Passata works, and so does a can of San Marzano tomatoes de-seeded, de-cored and drained on a sieve before you crush them. San Marzano is the variety grown in the volcanic soil around Naples, and its low seed count and low acidity are the reason it became the standard for this pizza. Season with sea salt and a spoonful of tomato paste and stop there.
• The cheese. Fior di latte is fresh cow's milk mozzarella and it runs around 60% moisture, which is a lot of water to release onto a thin crust in two minutes. Squeeze it out over the sink before it goes anywhere near the dough. Tear the fresh mozzarella cheese into rough layers rather than slicing it, and dot 5 to 6 pieces around the pizza instead of covering it. Buffalo mozzarella is the other traditional choice and is even wetter, so drain it harder.
• The basil. Fresh basil leaves go on after the bake, never before. At 500 F they blacken in seconds. Let the pizza sit for a moment first so the leaves stay green, then add them with a drizzle of olive oil brushed over the crust.

Where the Margherita Comes From

Pizza margherita belongs to Naples, and the story usually told is that in 1889 the Neapolitan pizzaiolo Raffaele Esposito made a pizza for Queen Margherita of Savoy in the colors of the newly unified Italy: red tomato, white mozzarella, green basil. Historians argue about how much of that is legend, but the name stuck and so did the combination.

What genuinely defines a Neapolitan pizza is not the toppings but the bake. A wood-fired oven in Naples runs somewhere around 900 F and cooks a pizza in 60 to 90 seconds, which is what produces that puffed, blistered rim and a base that stays soft. A home oven cannot reach that, which is the entire reason for the two-stone setup and the hour-long preheat in this recipe: the stones store heat and radiate it back, and the broiler does for the top what the dome of a wood oven would.

Working With the Dough, the Peel and the Stone

The pizza dough here is my quick one-hour Neapolitan dough, built on 460 g of 00 flour, 8 g of quick-rise yeast, a teaspoon of salt and lukewarm water at 60 to 70 F. Let the portioned dough balls sit at room temperature before you shape them; cold dough fights back and tears instead of stretching. Shape by hand, pressing from the center outward to leave a rim, then let gravity do the rest as you rotate the disc to about 10 inches. Do not use a rolling pin, which crushes the gas out of the rim you are trying to build.

Dust a wooden pizza peel with semolina rather than flour, since semolina rolls like tiny ball bearings and flour burns. Build the pizza on the peel, not on the counter, and give it a small shake before you launch to confirm it is moving freely. A pizza stone and a baking steel both work, though steel conducts faster and gives you a darker base. Once the pizza comes out, move it to a cutting board and cut it into slices with a wheel cutter rather than a knife, which drags the toppings across the pizza.