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How to make pizza like a Neapolitan master
- airstrike 6y agoI'm quarantined with two Italians (father-in-law and his mother) from Northern Italy and had been planning on making pizza from scratch to surprise them but always thought I would make a huge mess in the kitchen... from the video, it looks totally manageable! The hardest part is having to wait 11 hours to eat it!
- C19is20 6y agoN.Italy: I'm quarantined [well, it's lockdown, really] with two Italians, one is my wife (other is son): I'm not allowed even remotely near the kitchen. Every mealtime has become a stereotypically-italian ultra-marathon. 2.4kg heavier since. Yes, i am trying to keep fit but going from 30-200km daily bicycle rides (eas 28km commute and back for work) to balconia+pasta+pasta sure takes it toll.
- muxator 6y ago> I'm not allowed even remotely near the kitchen Ahha! I do not know why, but in every international couple I have met (including mine) the Italian part always ends up taking over the kitchen. My non-Italian wife says it is a matter of low adaptability to different cooking styles on our part. Maybe it's true. But she seems to be happy to accept it :-)
- toyg 6y agoAs an Italian, I agree with your wife: my countrymen can be downright racist when it comes to food. Often they struggle to accept even other Italian food that is not from their own city. Then again, that's how Italian cuisine managed to survive the industrial revolution whereas others didn't make it.
- mrighele 6y agoIn my case it is my significant other which had trouble adapting to Italian food. I took over the kitchen anyway :-), and I'm learning how to cook Turkish food, which is as wonderful as the Italian food.
- perlgeek 6y ago> The hardest part is having to wait 11 hours to eat it! That's mostly a matter of perspective. You have to plan your Pizza a day ahead, but making the dough on the day before and putting it into the fridge doesn't feel as bad as waiting with a hungry stomach before food is served :-)
- kevinmchugh 6y agoMost things that involve flour are messy until you learn the technique. Launching a pizza into the oven can be very messy as well
- JackMcMack 6y agoMy favorite read on pizza: http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm
- ThePhysicist 6y agoDamn, he bakes those at 825F (440 °C), which unfortunately is unattainable with most regular home ovens. Mine e.g. maxes out at 300 °C so it's not hot enough to let the crust rise significantly and produce a nicely charred underside, at least not before completely burning the top. What I'm currently experimenting with to solve this problem is to put the pizza on a flat, heavy and preheated iron pan or plancha and heat it at maximum power on the induction stove for 3 minutes to get the metal really hot. Then I put it in the oven at 300 °C for around 10 minutes. Doesn't produce perfectly charred pizza but comes a lot closer to what you can achieve with a real pizza oven. Still I'm not fully satisfied with the result, so thanks for the article link, I'll definitely try to apply some tricks mentioned there!
- stevievee 6y agoFor a quick pizza, I use a "Ooni" pizza oven and the results have been great. It's relatively cheap and you can get the temperatures you are looking for. I joined their first kickstarter and have been buying their ovens ever since: https://uk.ooni.com/collections/shop-all/products/ooni-koda https://uk.ooni.com/collections/shop-all/products/ooni-koda
- pbowyer 6y agoFor years I've dreamed of building a wood-fired pizza oven, or buying one of the cast kits from https://www.fornobravo.com/ https://www.fornobravo.com/. But this looks way easier and cheaper. How long does a gas cylinder last?
- fatboy 6y agoI've got the big ooni oven, and use it pretty much daily for 1-5 pizzas. It takes 20-25 minutes to heat up, then maybe 90 seconds to cook a pizza. The gas burner states it uses about 450g per hour on max, which seems to tally with what I get out of a 13kg propane bottle, which is in the region of 45 -60 days. The propane tank costs €34 to refill here. edit: I also dreamed for years of building a wood-fired oven, but I'm totally happy with the gas one. The way I can make myself a pizza in 25 minutes start to finish is hard to argue with. People ask me if the lack of smoke in the oven makes for a subpar pizza, but in my opinion it makes no difference. The oven is so hot that any smoke in a wood-fired oven is well above the pizza. It's just the heat you need.
- chiefalchemist 6y agoI typically buy my dough from Trader Joe's but what to start doing it myself. There's a recipe in the article, but anyone else have a goto recipe they love?
- platoscubicle 6y agohttps://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2012/07/basic-new-york-style-pizza-dough.html https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2012/07/basic-new-york-s... Almost anything on serious eats by Kenji is good imo. There is a whole section on pizza but the above recipe is my favorite.
- mhh__ 6y agohttps://www.pizzamaking.com/pizza-recipes.html https://www.pizzamaking.com/pizza-recipes.html Perhaps start with the New York style
- KozmoNau7 6y agoSpecifically this one: https://www.pizzamaking.com/lehmann-nystyle.php https://www.pizzamaking.com/lehmann-nystyle.php Which should really be called a Roman-style pizza tonde dough, which is the style that was predominantly adopted in NYC.
- perlgeek 6y agoJust a quick thought: depending on how adventurous you feel, you might consider buying ready-made pizza dough from the supermarket, and start with that. If you like your pizza, the next iteration would be to also make the dough yourself. Expect several iterations / attempts until you can make it well and reproducible, and get a good feel for how much you need. The first few batches of pizza dough I made were not very good :-).
- tomcooks 6y agoA lot of failed attempts is, undoubtely, the most important ingredient. Anything else will be affected by room temperature, humidity, oven performance, wind direction, campanilismo, etc. Buy flour, yeast, salt, oil and experiment.
- xchip 6y agoPlease ignore all these experts, all they want is to make you feel special because you drink/eat their stuff. Above a certain threshold one cannot tell the difference between good and very good. Wine tasters know it and it has been very well documented. When it comes to flavours, as long as it doesn't harm you, your judgement is as good as anybody else.
- subpixel 6y agoJust as importantly, don’t fall for fetishism. Neapolitan pizza is a very specific style of pizza that, while “authentic” and photogenic, is by no means a superior style of pizza. Especially made poorly, at home, in an oven that is 200 degrees colder than necessary!
- tomcooks 6y agoWhile I agree on your fetishism point, which is in my opinion a byproduct of both post-colonialist "exoticism" and capital-driven standardization of products: using a refractory stone allows your kitchen oven to reach the right temperatures. And it IS a superior style of pizza /s
- ReptileMan 6y agoSorry - refractory stone is not enough for neapolitan pizza in home oven. You need something like the baking steel. And if you manage to get the infrared heater on during bake - you can get into the holy 2 minutes of bake time.
- eagsalazar2 6y agoNeapolitan Pizza is the poster child for fetishism, hipster cargo cult, worshiping a style that has only been deemed by the community as superior, not experienced individually to be so. At its absolute best it is significantly inferior to top American examples.
- tomcooks 6y ago
- throw0101a 6y agoPrevious discussion from last week: * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22897962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22897962
- chesterarthur 6y agoThe secret to great pizza sauce is more sugar than you’d expect.
- tomcooks 6y agoI don't understand the downvotes, given that sugar both feeds the yeast bacteria needed for proper rising, and to balance the high acidity of tomatoes.
- gnrlst 6y agoyes but you don't mix the dough with the tomatoes until the very end so it wouldn't impact the yeast. With proper flour sugar is not necessary, as the flour itself will be broken down by the yeast (hence the maturing/proofing stage). If you "exhaust" the flour, then you'll need sugar to get an "artificial" Maillard reaction and a nice browning of the crust.
- tomcooks 6y agoYes obviously you don't add tomatoes and sugar to the dough, you prepare a sauce on the side and add a bit of sugar to that. Yeast needing no sugar to work is something I've never heard of, could you please forward more information about this? Thank you.
- nkozyra 6y agoThere's simple carbohydrates in flour, so presumably that's what the comment is implying.
- cyphar 6y agoDough will rise just as well without any added sugar -- the starches in the flour are the primary food source for the yeast. If you don't believe me, try it yourself. The purpose of sugar in doughs is to assist browning -- especially at home-oven temperatures -- and "improve" the flavour. I personally prefer baking dough without sugar, but you do whatever you prefer.
- ykevinator 6y agoGreat read, thanks for sharing, there was just a new oven announced, I think it's ooni, which is for this kind of pizza. It's an outdoor propane pizza oven. BTW, I'm not sure you can cook pizza at 500 degrees in 90 seconds like the article says.
- cosmodisk 6y agoPizza is a dough base with some veg and cheese sprinkled on top of it. Lets not make it more special than it needs to be. It's not very hard to make it and even first time it will taste good enough.Maybe not as good as if some Italian would do it but definitely not bad either.
- notechback 6y agoAnd why not try to improve the pizza you make at home? Strange perspective.
- dkdbejwi383 6y agoFood is just nutrients held in a structure. Let's not make it more special than it needs to be.
- C19is20 6y agoYour beer thoughts?
- progre 6y agoUsing this exact reasoning I have gone from microbrew IPA:s to cheap straight vodka.
- ggurgone 6y agoHear me out this is one of the best how-to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN2HkepzPhU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN2HkepzPhU – an Italian who eats 2 pies per week on average
- cptwunderlich 6y agoOr this one, which I think is the exact same recipe by the same guy, but made in the oven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq90lUQUCUo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cq90lUQUCUo I really love his accent xD Reminds me of my semester in Naples <3
- chadcmulligan 6y agosince we're sharing - I love watching this lady cook Italian food https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjXWVSbWBV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjXWVSbWBV4
- ggurgone 6y agohaha that accent! The recipes seem legit. This type of cuisine is quite healthy
- alanfranz 6y agoNorther Italian here: the recipe for the dough is reasonable. I usually go for 500g flour (typically a mix of 0 and 00 which I find at my grocery store) and 300ml water. If you want a much quicker fermentation, You can use between 15g and 25g of yeast. Put a couple teaspoons of sugar to let the yeast work better, and make sure the water is between 20°C and 45°C. But the most interesting idea for home baking is the "double fermentation": let the dough rest for about one hour in a slightly warm environment (20°C - 40°C - usually that means starting the oven for one minute, then turning it off and putting the covered dough in). Then prepare the base for the pizza on your baking tin, but DO NOT PUT anything on it; instead, leave it for 30-45 min more resting in the oven. Then, extract it, put the tomato and other things, and cook it.
- tomcooks 6y agoUsing honey instead of sugar in my opion gives even better results.
- phonypc 6y ago>Norther Italian here No offence intended, I'm genuinely curious; isn't pizza a southern thing? This reads to me like a person from the northern US weighing in on BBQ. It's perfectly allowed, but why qualify with northern?
- alanfranz 6y ago> This reads to me like a person from the northern US weighing in on BBQ The US is much larger than Italy, you know! By the way, I qualified as "Northern" exactly for the "southern thing" reason. Pizza is an italian staple and, as such, different regions have different recipes and dough styles - not just trying to imitate the "original" version. Such original version is Neapolitan pizza, which is indeed very good. But it's hard to bake a true Neapolitan pizza at home. Would you prepare your dough 24 hours before? Have you got the right temperature where to leave it? Does your oven reach 450°C ? So I chimed in with some suggestions to bake a good pizza at home - and, as far as I know, most people use a variation of such recipe when at home. Including people from Neaples! I wasn't commenting on the perfect dough for the perfect Neapolitan pizza for a pizzeria; that's far beyond my competence levels. EDIT: after all, from my comment it COULD look like I was commenting on the "Neapolitan master" pizza recipe; that was not my intention. My bad. My suggestion is valid for HOME BAKING.
- jpm_sd 6y agoI always have a hard time getting the dough stretched out really thin. I end up with super floof pizza. What am I doing wrong?
- gomox 6y agoMost likely gluten development. Aka you need more kneading, or higher protein content flour, or both (but most likely just the former).
- tomcooks 6y agoIt obviously depends on what you prefer, but Neaples style pizza is fluffy: it doesn't get flattened but instead air pockets are pushed by hand towards the outside border.
- nkozyra 6y agoYou may not be letting it sit long enough or you may not be stretching it long enough. The advantage of the dough toss is the centrifugal force that adds enough force to stretch the dough a lot and evenly. If I don't spin my dough I get a pie crust that's too thick.
- cmod 6y agoThis is the best video on making neapolitan style at home with an cast iron pan and oven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXAW2GseICs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXAW2GseICs I've used this method a few times to superb results.
- rv-de 6y agopizza from a pan ... that's downright frivolous - can't wait to give that a try!
- tomcooks 6y agoThe article fails to mention Roman "pinsa", which was commonplace a _bit_ earlier than 1700 and is what gave pizza its name. https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinsa https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinsa
- hellofunk 6y agoThe term “margherita pizza” suggests a different authentic meaning compared to the widespread conception.
- albmoriconi 6y agoI am from Naples and eat regularly at Gino Sorbillo's and Ciro Salvo's places. As it often happens here, everyone will swear by its pretty small and obscure "favorite place", but they are masters without doubt ;) The dough recipe from the article is pretty legit and exactly the way I do it at home; the main problem I see is that it would be pretty hard to find good Mozzarella or Fiordilatte cheese (Fiordilatte di Agerola is slightly drier than Mozzarella, therefore producing less liquid in the oven, and also costs less), and I find that pizza done according to the Neapolitan recipe loses much when using a different kind of cheese. A pet peeve of mine is that many recipes, while getting most of it right, use instant yeast; an important part of Neapolitan pizza is the slow dough rise using very little amounts of yeast, that should take from a minimum of 7/8 hours to an entire day or more (of course by storing it in a fridge).
- slow_donkey 6y agoWhy would instant yeast have an effect on slow rising? You'd just use a smaller amount than AD or cake yeast? I can't think of any significant difference especially compared to AD.
- albmoriconi 6y agoIt seems that I wrongly thought that "instant yeast" was what we call "lievito istantaneo", i.e. baking powder, that would give a a pretty different end-product. It looks like it can also refer to instant active yeast, i.e. dehydrated beer yeast, that should actually be fine as far as I can tell (I have no idea of exact proportions however).
- chrisgarand 6y agoOfficially, I understood you couldn't use dry yeast, that has changed it seems: https://www.pizzanapoletana.org/en/ricetta_pizza_napoletana https://www.pizzanapoletana.org/en/ricetta_pizza_napoletana That being said, you can probably use a smaller amount of instant yeast, it definitely shouldn't be replaced as a 1:1 with regular yeast as the fermentation time is an integral part of the flavour profile.
- teekert 6y agoI'm surprised they use yeast and not sourdough as that would add more flavor. Sourdough is surprisingly easy to make and maintain btw. During these wfh days especially: Just mix 50grams of flour with 50 grams of water and leave in an open container for a couple of days, when you see bubbles, put half of is (50gr) together with 25gr of flour and 25gr of water, repeat. In a bread of 500 grams of meal and 250 ml of water, add 100 gr of your bubbling sourdough, kneed, let rise for 3 hours, and overnight into the fridge, easy peasy. Btw, that standard kneeding hook of the Kitchen aid is really a pos: Get a better one asap.
- toyg 6y agoFor the daily "HN teaches you to" segment: HN teaches Neapolitan pizza master how to make pizza.
- teekert 6y agoI doubt the pizza master will read HN, if he does, my surprise stands and I'd ask him... why not sourdough? ;) Sourdough is the ancient way, that's why I mentioned it, also, it gives me great pleasure to use it for baking. Take my comment as you will, perhaps you can derive some value from it.
- 1123581321 6y agoThis comment lessens the discussion; the one you replied to does not, even if it is not the best suggestion.
- Krasnol 6y agoI prefer thicker dough for my pizza. Those ultra-thin doughs just feel like a cheat. 550 flour, half cube yeast, a tiny spoon salt and sugar, 150ml milk filled up by water to ~275ml fluid. 5 spoons oil. Knead the dough and add the fluid. When it's nice textured leave it for the rest of the day or at least a few hours. You get a dough you can load full with whatever you want and you'll have enough food for a few days.
- tmaly 6y agoMy biggest challenge has been making a good sauce. I love making pizza at home with my kids.
- cmain 6y agoIMO you best bet is a simple sauce with good tomatoes. Bianco Dinapoli, Sclafani (from NJ not Italy), Jersey Fresh, and anything from Stanislaus are good choices. From there just mix in salt and a minced clove of garlic (per 28oz can) and whatever else you like (olive oil, basil, oregano). Don't cook it. Its better to mix it and let it sit for a few days in the fridge.
- KozmoNau7 6y agoHonestly, I prefer using good passata and just a bit of salt and olive oil. If you can't get passata, use crushed tomatoes and blend them first. Don't cook it, any canned tomato product has already been heated as part of the canning process. Quality matters, don't use the cheap cans from the supermarket. I'm lucky that I have an absolutely fantastic Italian specialty store here in Copenhagen, where I can get amazing quality canned tomatoes and great cuts of cured meat for toppings. And 'nduja, oh boy the 'nduja. For cheese I actually use completely ordinary Danish Havarti, it's like a slightly aged low-moisture whole milk mozzarella, it melts great and it's available literally everywhere here. Neapolitan pizza is something you really need a wood-fired oven or something that gets similarly hot. An ordinary oven won't cut it. As I live in an apartment and have very limited space for gadgets, I stick to Roman-style pizza tonde, where you can get absolutely amazing results in an ordinary oven with a baking steel (mine is an 8mm thick 8kg slab of iron from an industrial steelworks, but the commercial ones are great too).
- 34679 6y agoI highly recommend the book "American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza". I have a digital version and it took my pizza game to the next level. >Master bread baker Peter Reinhart follows the origins of pizza from Italy to the States, capturing the stories behind the greatest artisanal pizzas of the Old World and the New. >Beginning his journey in Genoa, Reinhart scours the countryside in search of the fabled focaccia col formaggio. He next heads to Rome to sample the famed seven-foot-long pizza al taglio, and then to Naples for the archetypal pizza napoletana. Back in America, the hunt resumes in the unlikely locale of Phoenix, Arizona, where Chris Bianco of Pizzeria Bianco has convinced many that his pie sets the new standard in the country. The pizza mecca of New Haven, grilled pizza in Providence, the deep-dish pies of Chicago, California-style pizza in San Francisco and Los Angeles—these are just a few of the tasty attractions on Reinhart's epic tour. >Returning to the kitchen, Reinhart gives a master class on pizza-making techniques and provides more than 60 recipes for doughs, sauces and toppings, and the pizzas that bring them all together. His insatiable curiosity and gift for storytelling make American Pie essential reading for those who aspire to make great pizza at home, as well as for anyone who enjoys the thrill of the hunt.
- cmain 6y agoMastering Pizza by Marc Vetri is another good one. As well as The Pizza Bible by Tony Gemignani.
- mishkovski 6y agoOur last attempt: https://www.instagram.com/p/B_TDukylKSj/ https://www.instagram.com/p/B_TDukylKSj/ We made it in a regular home oven but on maximum temperature of 285°C (545°F) and broiler on. It takes no more than 2-3 minutes. We followed this recipe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-SJGQ2HLp8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-SJGQ2HLp8
- lisper 6y agoWow, Instagram has really gone over to the dark side. They haven't just broken the back button, they have entirely disabled it. There is no way to escape that site other than typing in a new URL or going to your browser history.
- mishkovski 6y agoTerrible, sorry about that. Only on desktop though. On mobile works fine.
- jasonlotito 6y agoWorks fine in desktop Safari, so it's a problem with your browser.
- lisper 6y agoInteresting. I'm using firefox with noscript. So it's not that Instagram has intentionally disabled the back button, it's (apparently) that they're trying to intercept it somehow and when they fail it ends up disabled. Still kinda hinky if you ask me.
- exhilaration 6y agoI'm curious, do you have a very thin layer of seemingly uncooked/raw/wet dough just under the tomato sauce? We use a high quality pizza steel, run our oven at max heat and preheat everything for 45 minutes, but that layer is always there.
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- nonamenoslogan 6y agoPersonally, I like my Pizazz Pizza plate/oven thing. I make dough out of like 5 ingredients and let it rise for a few hours in the fridge. Top with whatever and eat--pizza is about enjoyment to me, not this Anthony Bourdain never ending quest for the perfect slice of sushi, its about making it, enjoying it, eating it.
- lisper 6y agoI can't speak to pizza, but I have an espresso story to tell. One of my favorite things about going to Italy is the quality of the coffee. I really like extreme dark roast (your typical American diner coffee doesn't even count as coffee in my book). In Italy you can go into pretty much any coffee shop and come away with a top-quality espresso. (Don't even get me started on Starbucks.) It's a taste I inherited from my parents, who have European roots. Now, my parents are seriously old-school. They still live in the house I grew up in, a house they bought new in 1975 and pretty much never updated. It still has the original flower-pattern wall paper. Walking into their house today feels like stepping into a time machine that transports you to an episode of the Brady Bunch. And in their kitchen is a 40-year-old Mr. Coffee which my father loves to futz with. On a good day he can coax it into producing an acceptable cup of joe, but that's about it. So for their 50th anniversary I decided I was going to buy them a proper espresso machine. Now, I know next to nothing about espresso except that I love to drink it, so I started doing some homework and very soon got lost in a morass of coffee geekdom. The range of options available in the espresso machine market is truly mind-boggling, as are the prices. I didn't mind dropping some serious coin (this was their 50th anniversary after all) but I wanted to make sure I was actually getting something for my money. So I decided to do some experiments. At the time I worked in a co-working office that had a high-end espresso machine (retail price $5000) and several Italians so I asked one of them to show me how to make a proper espresso. I wanted to use the espresso that came out of the office machine as a baseline and compare it to what I could make on a less expensive machine to see if the machine actually made a difference. "The first thing you have to do," he told me, "is to get the right beans. You have to go to this little specialty shop that's a half-hour drive away and get this particular brand of beans..." which, of course, cost $50 a pound or something absurd like that. But I love my parents, so I dutifully complied. Proper beanage having been procured, we spent several hours brewing espresso with just about every possible variation on the theme you could imagine. Different grinds (we had a high-end burr grinder in the office too), different packings, different machine settings. Not once did we manage to produce a cup that any of us considered even remotely drinkable. It was all acidic and awful, probably because the machine had never been cleaned since it was installed god-only-knows how many years before. I ended up getting them a Keurig. I got one for myself too. It makes a decent cup of coffee, but nothing compared to what you find in Italy. It is still a mystery to me how the Italians manage to produce such consistently good coffee, but only in Italy. When they come to the U.S. they seem to lose the touch. Maybe there's something in the water.
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- auiya 6y agoSource ingredients that are only available in one location on earth, and cook using a device which is very uncommon in most households. Sure, easy.
- orangesquirrel 6y agoFor anyone interested in more information: I recently discovered Vito Iacopelli's excellent YouTube channel on (predominantly Neapolitan) pizza making. He runs a Neapolitan pizzaria in Los Angeles and covers things like stretching techniques, tests with different ingredients and fermentation processes, and methods specifically designed to be used at home. https://www.youtube.com/user/maestrovitoiacopelli https://www.youtube.com/user/maestrovitoiacopelli
- nakedrobot2 6y agoGet the G3 Ferrari electric pizza oven. you can cook a pizza in 2-3 minutes in that. There is even (of course!) an online community of pizza oven hackers who install additional electric heating elements in the oven to get the temperature even higher :)
- balls187 6y agoThe first episode of Ugly Delicious on Netflix was about Pizza, including Neapolitan pizza. Chef Chang ordered Domino's pizza to one of the restaurants. Hilarious.
- rv-de 6y agoI very much enjoy making pizza (or pasta) in the evening after work. It's a great way to relax, watch something on the side and provides some kind of Italian style escapism where you enter semi-consciously a fantasy world of Mediterranean savoir vivre (what's the Italian term here?). In the end I enjoy (usually together with my girlfriend or guests) the result with a nice bottle of red wine which provides the elevating intoxication to round up the experience. I like to experiment with my pizza and pasta recipes and place focus on trying to keep it simple. I believe that art benefits of some structure. Think rhyming patterns in poems or tonality in music. I'm aware of atonal music or not rhyming poetry but that's my point - it's a very different experience - more difficult. That's why I also like to not go and buy the best most expensive ingredients but instead attempt to restrict them to what I get from ALDI. Sometimes I'm just going crazy in some bio market and just buy the top notch stuff. But it seems that the taste is not that much depending on whether the tomatoes are from San Marzano or your run-of-the-mill variety from a regular super market. My latest - not yet used - pizza gadget is an oven stone. Can't wait to find out how it will affect the outcome.
- joefourier 6y agoA pizza stone is a definite improvement, but what will make an absolute world of difference is a proper pizza oven (preferably wood-fired, but gas also works). I instantly went from mediocre home pizza to almost restaurant grade simply by switching from my household oven to an Ooni, despite using the same ingredients and preparation method.
- salimmadjd 6y agoLike many, I've been learning new recipes recently and that includes pizza - I've been using this dough recipe (it has wholewheat in it) [0] and been really liking the flavor of the dough. I've also moved to slow rise, the dough flavor seems more complex (or it could be psychosomatic). I leave it in the fridge for 2 days or 3 days, depending on how quickly we go through one batch. But for cooking, I'm following this method (which is similar to what suggested in the OP). Basically to cook the pizza with tomato sauce first and then add the cheese [1] (PSA - this guy has such fun personality, be prepared to watch hours of his pizza videos) I've also bought canned peel san marzano tomatoes (from both Whole Foods and TJs) and just used an impression blender to puree it with some basil. I watched an interview with the owner of Lucali in NY [2] and he said he cooks his tomato sauce. So I've been cooking my tomato puree simmering it for 30-40 min. It makes it much richer. Still not sure if I like it more or not. [0] https://www.billyparisi.com/homemade-pizza-homemade-pizza-dough-recipe/ https://www.billyparisi.com/homemade-pizza-homemade-pizza-do... [1] https://youtu.be/xuy8sP4Wb2k?t=142 https://youtu.be/xuy8sP4Wb2k?t=142 [2] https://youtu.be/BSHh0MmJM1U?t=339 https://youtu.be/BSHh0MmJM1U?t=339
- 867-5309 6y agosomeone mentioned honey instead of sugar, can I have some thoughts on milk instead of water and brown instead of white flour?
- nakedrobot2 6y ago- don't use sugar at all - no - no
- 867-5309 6y agoI've seen them all in recipes and am seeking alternatives, but thanks anyway..
- carlesfe 6y agoA question for italians: do you use raw tomato puree, or do you fry it? I've always used fried tomato puree (fried at home with olive oil)
- 1024core 6y agoI'm not Italian, but from what I've seen (from watching YT videos on pizzas) they say always use the raw puree.
- syedkarim 6y agoNothing beats Neapolitan-style pizza. If you are ever in Chicago, skip the deep dish and instead head over to Spacca Napoli on the city's northside. https://www.spaccanapolipizzeria.com/ https://www.spaccanapolipizzeria.com/ Supposedly, the owner shipped in Italian raw materials for the clay oven, as well as Italian masons to build it. I don't know that the oven is the reason for why their product is so good, but it is just miles apart from any other type of pizza in Chicago. They also have wines that can't be found anywhere else in the US.
- nwsm 6y agoPersonally prefer both NY style and deep dish over Neapolitan. Neapolitans are beautiful and have good flavors, but I think the floppy structure is much worse.
- Obi_Juan_Kenobi 6y agoNeopolitan is a setup for failure in the home kitchen. It's one of the most demanding styles in terms of equipment and preparation. It makes zero sense to pursue it at home unless you actually have a very strong preference for this style (highly unlikely if commercial pizza is even a crude reflection of preferences). It's fetishism. It's sought because it has cultural cachet, it's hard to obtain, it's 'authentic', etc.
- emptybits 6y ago> setup for failure ... most demanding ... makes zero sense ... It's fetishism. It's sought because it has cultural cachet, it's hard to obtain, it's 'authentic', etc. Totally agree. There's beauty in such crazy pursuits, don't you think? I shared the link in the spirit of HN, knowing this place is full of people who enjoy chasing obsessions that are risky, or just because, or because someone said it was impossible. Long live kitchen hackers with zero sense! It's always enriching and occasionally successful. :-)
- pachico 6y agoDisclaimer: I grew up in Italy and frequently travel there. Best pizza I ever had was in Vienna, yes, made by an Italian but not the classical Napolitan pizza. I strongly prefer Rome as reference for it.
- dredmorbius 6y agoFor a practical, home-bakable, sourdough recipe I can vouch for: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HXAW2GseICs https://youtube.com/watch?v=HXAW2GseICs Top comment: "There is more drama in this video than in the entire Transformers franchise."
- skosch 6y agoI have found that the key to getting the dough really stretchy is the autolyse part: first mix ~⅔ of the flour/yeast with all of the water to make something like a pancake batter, stir for a few minutes, and let that sit for at least 20 minutes. Then add in the rest of the flour, knead, and let rest overnight. This isn't mentioned in the linked BBC article, but both http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm and http://www.perfekte-pizza.de/ http://www.perfekte-pizza.de/ swear by it, and I think it has made a noticeable difference to my dough.