EASY NEAPOLITAN PIZZA MADE AT HOME
Easy Neapolitan Pizza made at home? For those who know a little bit how the best pizza is made, “easy Neapolitan pizza made at home” sounds unreal, I know. But hey, I was also sceptical for the first time. With good quality ingredients, lots of love, a bit of passion and good preparation, there is no way you cannot get really good neapolitan pizza made at home easily! I myself, am a huge fan of pizza. But it wasn’t like that all the time. I didn’t like pizza that much before I really tried the real pizza napoletana in Naples. When I was younger, I didn’t know the difference between frozen pizza from a supermarkt and the one you could order in our town in the pizzeria. My father also used to make pizza from an easy-to-make-pizza-sachet which tasted kind of like a piece of a cake with ketchup and corn on it. Not a big gourmet experience.
I started to understand more about pizza and food in general when I used to work in the gastronomy in Scotland. (yeah, in the country of fried food and bad tasting pizza 😀 ) My free time consisted of watching “Master Chef” Shows and that was the turning point where I fell in love with cooking and started to be curious about everything involving food preparation and cooking.
I had my first amazing pizza experience during our vacation in Marseille in France, where we ordered a pizza in a food truck just at the sea side. That pizza consisted of loooads of brie cheese and salsiccia. That pizza was so incredibly good that when someone asks me: ‘Hey, what is the best pizza you have ever eaten?’ My answer would be without hesitating: ‘The best pizza I have ever had was in Marseille on the beach’ 😀
To make a good tasting pizza at home resembling that from Naples, the birth place of pizza, you would need a good quality flour type 00. I usually go to Italy to buy my flour, but if you don’t have the opportunity, there are few places online where you can buy good flour, tomato sauce and mozarella. At the moment I buy italian flour in an online store Gurkerl here.
You could also buy a special flour at a different places, such as a pizzeria Via Toledo in Vienna. This place belongs to Francesco Calo (pizza master DOC of 2019), who launched his own flour brand recently, but it is still not available to buy online. I will keep you updated when it will be online. I find this flour as the best one I have ever used for making neapolitan pizza at home.
As next you will need a passata, which is basically cooked and strained through tomatoes. It is absolutelly simple to make your own passat at home, so next time I will show you how to do it. If you cannot be bothered by making it itself, I recommend brand Petti but it is almost impossible to buy it online in Austria so just buy a brand you find as most suitable for you. In Naples they use passata from San Marzano tomatoes, so if you can buy one, the better for you.
The original version of neapolitan pizza also consists of cheese called “Fior di Latte” (instead of mozzarella which lot of people think), which has a less content of water so the pizza don’t get too soggy when ready. As we cannot buy Fior di latte in Austria easily, I recommend to use rectangular mozzarella in block which can be grated.
Are you ready to prepare this easy neapolitan pizza at home? Lets do it!
The most important thing you will need is passion and joy of making your own food at home.
How to make the dough
Ingredients
You will need:
| 500g | good quality flour |
| 375 g | luke warm water |
| 13 g | sea salt |
| 1-2 g | fresh yeast |
Procedure:
You can either make the dough by hand or use a planetary kitchen maschine. It doesn’t matter what you choose as the result will be almost the same. Important is to get soft and smooth dough at the end.
First put flour into a large bowl and add salt. In another bowl combine water and yeast together. Make sure that water you will use has a luke-warm temperature. Let the yeast to relax for a bit. After few minutes, pour the yeast water into the flour. IMPORTANT: be careful, you want to do it little by little.
When you are done, divide the dough to 2 equal balls and let it rest for 24 hours in a fridge or 12 hours at the room temperature to get the best taste and result. IMPORTANT: cover up the dough with a cling film, otherwise it will dry out!
If you are too hungry, leave to leaven up for about 1 hour at least, before you proceed with toppings.
Take out from the fridge and stretch out the dough. The dough must have a smooth, elastic and stretchy consistency.
There are 3 proven ways of making a really good nepolitan pizza. The point is to bake the dough at the highest temperature possible, as the professional pizza oven reaches about 450-480 degrees of celsius. That is the secret why your pizza in the restaurant lands on your table within 2 minute after ordering 😀
- Put the ready pizza dough (which you stretched out) on a preheated non-stick pan (no oil), put tomato sauce and toppings on it and transfer under a hot grill in the oven and bake at 220 degrees celsius until golden and crispy.
- Preheat the so called pizza stone, transfer the ready-to-be-baked pizza onto it and leave to bake at 220 degrees celsius until cooked and crispy
- Heat up a regular baking tray in the oven, take it out and then transfer the ready to go pizza into the oven. Bake at 220 degrees for about 20 minutes.
Whatever procedure way of making your pizza you choose, always make sure that you have only the best possible ingredients you can get, good quality cheese and that you pout lot of love into making it.
I am so happy to have shared with you such easy and really good recipe at all! You know how it is, sometimes you come across a recipe which looks very easy and good and after you try it, you are completely disappointed, because it is either very difficult or just too unwell to make it right. But don’t worry, this recipe “Easy neapolitan pizza made at home” is just perfect for you!
You can also have a look at my Naples Travel Blog Post, where I describe my experience of eating the real pizza napoletana for the first time.
I hope you will enjoy it and don’t be shy and share your experience from making your own pizza at home!
Check out my other recipes for more tasteful Italian home made food you will definitely love.
Enjoy! Buon Appetito!
