Step by step to the perfect pizza
Does your homemade pizza never taste as good as it does at the pizzeria? With these tips, you’ll get pretty close.
Once you’ve made pizza yourself, you’ll notice that it’s nowhere near as intimidating as it seems. The dough is ready within fifteen minutes and then only needs to rise; in the meantime, you can make the sauce. And we simply use canned tomatoes for that—easy and just as tasty.
Pizza party
A pizza party is also one of the most enjoyable dinners you can host. A new pizza on the table every ten minutes, with different toppings. Make enough, because people can keep eating this endlessly.
The right flour
The base is the foundation of your pizza, so it needs to be fantastic. Crispy and airy, and preferably nice and thin too. The type of flour you use has a major influence on the final result. It’s best to use 00 flour. This is very finely milled and has a low gluten content, which gives you a good crunch.
Can’t find it? Patent flour is also very finely milled and makes perfectly tasty pizzas too.
Rising
To give the dough the airiness you want, it’s important to let it rise. With this recipe from Jamie Oliver, it only needs an hour. That gives you plenty of time to prep the rest of your ingredients.
Resting in the cold
If you roll out the bases first and then place them in the refrigerator for a while, they will be fermented cold. Sounds complicated, but this helps develop the flavor and makes the pizza brown more beautifully when you bake it later.
Do this after rolling out the base. If you start rolling cold dough, it will shrink every time you roll it out, and we don’t want that.
Sauces
Less is more when it comes to sauce. Too much sauce makes the base soggy. Besides, you still want to be able to taste the base you worked so hard on. Place a small amount of sauce in the center of the pizza with a ladle and spread it evenly over the entire pizza using the back of the spoon. It really only needs to be a very thin layer.
We always make tomato sauce ourselves, but in the easiest way possible. Purée a can of tomatoes and heat it with garlic, pepper and salt. Let it simmer briefly and stir in fresh basil at the very end.
Toppings
When it comes to toppings, we also go for a simple approach. Don’t forget that many ingredients contain moisture, which is released during baking. Fewer ingredients = less moisture = a crispier base.
Some things, such as sausage, onions, potatoes and aubergine, need to be cooked before they go on the pizza. Your pizza only needs a few minutes in the oven, nowhere near enough time to cook some ingredients through.
High temperature
Why is pizza at a good pizzeria almost always tastier? It’s mainly because of the oven temperature. A home oven often can’t reach such high temperatures, and the secret to a good pizza is baking it at scorching heat in just a few minutes. So always set your oven to its highest setting and read the next section.
Pizza stone
The way to achieve that perfect base in a regular oven is with a pizza stone. Preheat your oven for at least half an hour and the stone will become red-hot. This immediately sears the base and makes it much crispier than if you simply placed it on an oven tray.
You can already get a good one for around 20 euros, or stop by the hardware store for some loose stones they would otherwise throw away.
