The homemade Neapolitan pizza – making and baking

Preparing the base

Once your oven is hot and ready, we can begin to make the pizza. There are lots of tricks you can learn to stretch out a pizza based so let me try to explain the way I know as simply as possible 😊

Lightly flour your clean work surface (wooden board or clean table) and the pizza dough and place the dough onto the work surface flat. Push from the centre of the dough with the pads of your fingertips outward until you reach about 2 cm or an inch away from the edge. Essentially what you are doing is pushing the air that has been developing in the dough towards and into the edge or the crust of the dough. The further away from the edge you are, the larger your crust will be.

You can flour your hands and the dough if you find it sticky, this will make working with the dough easier, just remember to shake off any excess flour where possible.

Now that you have a basic shape of the pizza, we need to stretch the dough. There are many ways, the “steering wheel”, “rolling it over your knuckles”, stretching on the table. Personally, I prefer rolling it over my knuckles. Do to this, lift the dough and place it over your knuckles on both hands, then slowly rotate the dough while pulling your two hands apart and let gravity do the rest of the work. Try to do this evenly so that the dough has an even thickness all around. This way also tries to keep the crust as airy as possible. The “steering wheel” method is much the same except you have to carefully hold the around crust without squashing it, holding it up will let the dough stretch due to gravity, just turn the dough like you would a steering wheel so that you get an even shape.

There are many videos online you can watch to learn different techniques. I did! Once you are happy with the shape we can start saucing.

Saucing and topping

We are ready to sauce! Before we do I try keep the dough on a slightly floured surface just so that its still movable after we top. Saucing is simple, place approximately half a cup of sauce onto the centre of the base and use the back of the spoon to spread out the sauce so that is even on the dough. You can do this in a spiral motion outward toward the crust (try to keep sauce off the crust). Ideally try to keep the centre of the dough lightly sauced to reduce the weight in the centre of the dough lighter, just a tip.

I prefer to place my dough onto the paddle or peel (I’ll get to this part a bit later) once it is ready before I sauce and top the pizza just because I find it easier to put into my oven after.

Once sauced we can begin to top. With a classic Neapolitan pizza we want slivers or pieces of mozzarella cheese, a sprinkling of Pecorino cheese and a few pieces of fresh basil. Now we are ready to bake!

Launching the pizza

Launching the pizza is almost exactly what it sounds like. We want to launch the pizza off a pizza peel or paddle into a scalding hot oven so that the pizza bakes as fast as possible.

If you have sauced and topped your pizza before placing it on the paddle or peel, the best thing to do is to flour your paddle and slide the pizza onto your paddle by pinching two points on the crust and pulling the whole pizza onto the paddle. As I noted, I prefer to sauce and top the pizza on the paddle but both ways work with practice.

Just a note, if you are going to sauce and top on the peel or paddle, there is an element of time involved generally since the dough may stick to the peel and be hard to slide off if the peel is not floured well enough.

Once you are ready with the pizza on the peel, all that’s left is to shimmy or slide the pizza off the peel onto the stone in your oven or the floor of your pizza oven and watch that baby cook! When it is done you can just use the same peel to slide under the pizza and pull it out (you can use tongs if you are struggling).

If you don’t have a peel you can use the back of a smooth low sided baking tray as a worst case option.

Also, another tip I find is that with the slow cooking times of the pizza in conventional ovens and the fast melting of cheese, you can cook the pizza dough with just sauce until it rises for two to three minutes and then take it out to top it before finishing the bake. That way your cheese does not over melt and burn. Personally I find that helps depending on the oven you have but does involve more work.

Once its baked you can take it out, cut and enjoy!