I used to think you had to do crazy work to get a great pizza.
I did most of the stuff on this page (short of breaking my self-cleaning lock). It is all great advice, and if you follow it and practice a lot, you can make great pizzas and wow your guests.
BUT! After you have done that, you can also violate all the rules and still get great pizzas. Once, I was in Waipio Valley in Hawaii, with just Pillsbury white flour, bread yeast, a block of cheddar cheese, Wesson oil, tomato paste, fresh oregano, and spring water. To bake I had a gas oven with the rack out, a tall soup pot, inverted with a big skillet also inverted over it, close under the broiler. The pizzas came out fantastic! I could only make them 9" across, so I ended up making 30+ of them.
I had no peel. My dough was very, very wet; I scooped enough for each pizza with a big kitchen spoon, spread it out on parchment, drizzled Wesson, smeared tomato, sprinkled oregano, salt, and cheddar, slid it onto the skillet, and started on the next one.
The one thing you mustn't ever neglect is letting the flour and water proof for 40+ minutes before you work it.
To get decent pizza at almost any American restaurant, you have to insist "burn it!" or they will be afraid you will get mad about a little charring, and so undercook it the way Americans demand. You have to tell them that if it bends, it's not done enough.
Regardless of the recipe, technique and setup thin crust pizzas are still incredibly hard to do well at home.
Thicker foccacia-style pizzas are very easy and come out right on the first try, but thin crust pizzas at the very least require an oven that can go above 300c and that's very rare.
Yup. We had a great pizza chain called Anthony's Coal Fired Pizza, that would cook the pizza "well done". Apparently, they had enough complaints that they now under-cook it by default, unless you explicitly ask them to "burn it". Unfortunately, the new ownership that made that change (that Anthony refused to make for years), also made some other changes that took them from "great" to just "good".
I wonder how these techniques reconcile with the 24h dough method. He suggests that the warm rise method is more difficult to do effectively, but seems to bank it on a 6h timeline, and this is what he's comparing to a 1-2 day cold-rise. I expect this uses a particularly warm environment for rapid rise.
I just leave dough on the counter for 22-24 hours, room temperature, i.e. the Jim Lahey method. In rabid pizza forums the prevailing wisdom seems to be that cold-rise is inferior to that. However I'm not taking into account the other aspects of the technique.
Since I oven-bake at 550F my dough isn't nearly as wet. Still comes out quite flavorful. I don't autolyse before kneading however, and might endeavor to start doing so.
This is the secret, combined with stretching the gluten without tearing the dough, and giving the dough enough time to slowly rise (e.g in a fridge overnight).
(Basically make Pan Cristal dough for your pizza )
Fantastic website. Far better than 98% of the sites I’ve visited this year. Far better than any site designed by a front-end engineer. Loaded fast despite all the pictures. No cookie warning. No doorslams. No static elements taking up half the viewport. The only thing it needs is a max-width to limit the line length.
2. It's easy to forget that the original HTML spec was meant for end-users to use directly to author documents. It was originally designed to function like markdown, because a lot of the DOS-based word processing editors at the time also had similarities that end-users could grok.
The current reality of technical literacy, despite the information on html being accessible, is so far from that original ideal.
I dunno, I like a cooked sauce sometimes. Lucali cooks it and it adds a nice caramelized flavor to the pizza. Part of the beauty with pizza are the many different ways to make it. I also like the Difara/Lucali etc. way of adding multiple cheeses, usually a low moisture mozzarella and a Parmesan, sometimes also a fresh, wet mozzarella. Doesn't mean pizzas with only mozzarella are bad.
it definitely had to have come after '98, as it had a solid background. in '98, we were still fascinated by animated gif tiles repeated to fill the background or some other pattern only slightly less annoying than animated.
This has been my go to pizza recipe for years. Super stoked to see it on the front page of HN.
My favorite step is “jailbreaking” your home oven with a pair of bolt cutters to use the cleaning cycle to get pizza oven temps.
> I've cook good pizzas at temps under 725F, but never a great one. The cabinet of most ovens is obviously designed for serious heat because the cleaning cycle will top out at over 975 which is the max reading on my Raytec digital infrared thermometer. The outside of the cabinet doesn't even get up to 85F when the oven is at 800 inside. So I clipped off the lock using garden shears so I could run it on the cleaning cycle. I pushed a piece of aluminum foil into the door latch (the door light switch) so that electronics don't think I've broken some rule by opening the door when it thinks it's locked.
Lots of US ovens will hit 550°F without modification, and with a stone your pizza's cooked in ~7 minutes at that temp. It'll still be damn good. Fancy and gourmet and authentic-anything? No, but damn good. It'll even come out looking nice.
I just don't want people reading this thread to think you can't make really good pizza at home without buying a bunch of stuff or resorting to modding your stove. You can even make pan pizzas, so you don't have to buy a stone or any of that. More steps[0] but it works, and makes a better pizza than any major chain, with no special equipment whatsoever and very little mess.
[0] Pre-heat oven, lightly oil pan, build pizza in cold pan, heat pan on stove top until oil's been sizzling for a minute or so, cook in oven for ~5-10 minutes, turn on the broiler to finish the top when it's almost done—or hit the top with an electric heat gun or butane torch from your garage while it's heating on the stove top at the beginning, for finer control and to save time by skipping the broiler.
> My favorite step is “jailbreaking” your home oven with a pair of bolt cutters to use the cleaning cycle to get pizza oven temps.
If you have a baking steel, you can trick your oven into heating it well above the temperatures it normally allows. Place the steel very close to the broiler (leaving as little space as you can squeeze your pizza in) and leave the door slightly ajar. That little space will heat up high enough to make a "Neapolitan style" pizza in a home oven a possibility.
P.S. I've successfully done this; use this advice at your own risk :)
I don't think I actually trust most lowest bidder ranges you find in your average modern apartment to successfully self-clean without damaging either itself or it's surroundings. The top of mine gets hot enough to be uncomfortable just from normal 400 temperatures, and that's after passing through a hollow cavity where my eternally soiled and flammable grease traps sit.
I've been using an Ooni pizza oven (gas) weekly for almost a year, it's amazing! You do need to rotate the pizza a couple of times, but the oven reaches 800F in no time, and it's very portable too. Previously I tried a metal plate on a bbq, and a few other bbq implements (ceramic box), but the Ooni is by far the best.
Regarding recipes, Margarita is my go-to, more or less same sauce recipe, but I add a full ball of Burratta once out of the oven (too soft to even need to cook it).
Which version of it do you own? Have you found it useful for anything else? They seem to advertise cooking steak on it... Which I am skeptical of compared to a pan.
> Regarding recipes, Margarita is my go-to, more or less same sauce recipe, but I add a full ball of Burratta once out of the oven (too soft to even need to cook it).
This is all well and good, but given that it's mostly carbs (bread), how are you not hungry a short time later? Or do you have it for lunch, so you only have to last a few hours until supper/dinner?
I find that unless I have some protein/meat (which takes longer to digest?), my satiety doesn't last.
What an oddly biased list for something purporting to be "the best pizzerias in the world". :-( A zillion NY pizzerias, but only a handful from Naples and not a *single* non-Naples Italian place, much less anything in Europe except London. It's as if Roman-style pizza didn't even exist, much less anything between the two cities. Al Taglio entirely missing. And the non-NY US cities are given short shrift. Speaking from personal experience, the only listing in DC is for the extraordinary 2Amys, a Neapolitan shop in a class of its own compared to nearly all NY listings: but there are now many DC Neapolitan pizzerias of very high grade. No mention.
To be fair this is a very very old list dating back to 2006/2008 and these were the pizza names that came up constantly at that time - it's also only rating the shops that he personally traveled to which were predominantly NY/Neapolitan because that's likely what he was benchmarking his own restaurant against.
"The best $FOOD in the world" is going to be an inherently biased list, no matter how you dice it. Any time you see something like that, mentally append ", according to the taste and experiences of the author" to the title, if that lowers your blood pressure.
Personally, I tend to agree with Varasano: I've never been to Naples, but I have been to Rome, and to my tastebuds, even US-cooked Neapolitan pizza is better than Roman pizza. But that's just it: that's just my opinion, based on my taste. Take it or leave it. You'll choose to leave it, no doubt, and that's ok.
> there are now many DC Neapolitan pizzerias of very high grade
This was written in 2008, so more recent establishments of course won't be listed.
There's a lot to this article beyond his personal taste in pizzerias. I think if you look past that part, you'll find a lot that's interesting about it.
Where "NY style" means really very "NY style": thin and charred. If that's your taste, go for it...
But for those more into the traditional original bread-like Neapolitan style I strongly suggest using a sourdough based dough, like Tartine's[0]
Bear in mind: this is cooking, not engineering, not math. And, unlike New Yorkers seem to believe, pizza wasn't invented in the land of burguers and hotdogs.
Wherever there are Italian immigrants there are variations in pizza all over the world, from Chicago (deep dish) to Sao Paulo (stuffed border, "coroa de pizza"), from Liguria (piscialandrea) to Sicily (sfincione), from Rome (al taglio) to Naples, etc.
A simple & lazy bread machine dough (they have dough settings) will produce a damn good pie, given quality toppings. Best if you can rest it at room temp for a few hours after the machine's cycle finishes, but also OK if you can't. I've done fancier doughs, and it is better, but I mostly just do that these days. With that, you can either get some pizza-specific tools (peel, stone—you need the peel) or you can just make pan pizzas in a cast iron pan, no extra stuff needed—and that method's lower-mess. The down side is it's harder to do multiple pizzas quickly in a row, unless you have multiple cast iron pans, since you can't construct a second one while the first is using the pan, and when it comes out the pan is no fun to work on for a while, as it'll be quite hot.
Getting started making decent pizza at home is as simple and easy as a bread machine and a cast iron pan (or two).
(pro tip: get small cans of tomato sauce or crushed tomato [yes, use canned] and mix salt, way more black pepper than seems right, and some oregano [fresh is great if you have it, but dried is fine], directly in the can. Boom, nearly zero mess [one spoon, perhaps] sauce, on the cheap, and it's good. You don't need to pre-cook it, just put it directly on as is. You won't be able to beat this cheap, lazy method by too much unless you've got garden-grown sauce tomatoes)
[EDIT] other pro tip: you can build a pizza on your peel while another's in the oven provided you have a large cutting board. The pizza coming off the stone will be stiff enough that you can just shove it onto the cutting board. A peel provides little benefit for taking a pizza off a stone in a normal home oven, though it is very nice for putting it on. Further pro tip: avoid pretty, finished wood peels. Smooth-finished wood makes the dough stick way worse.
That's a weird recipe. '1 cup flour; 1 tbsp flour', '1 tbsp salt; 1 tsp salt', 'bread, 00, or all-purpose flour if neither of those are available'...
I somewhat understand the first, knowing that America has an aversion to mass-based (or even standard volumetric) measurements in recipes, so the alternative really is either an unreasonable number of tablespoons, or an unreasonably precise number of cups.
The latter however is pure nonsense. 'Bread flour', aka 'strong', is so named for relatively high protein content (gluten-producing capability). '00 flour' aka 'super-fine' refers to how finely it's milled; used particularly for pasta and has its proponents for pizza.
Orthogonal concepts. As a substitution chain it basically just reads 'flour' but in a way that implies any speciality is better than plain/'AP'.
> And, unlike New Yorkers seem to believe, pizza wasn't invented in the land of burguers and hotdogs.
Um, yeah. As a life long New Yorker I, and most anyone I know, are well aware of the origins of pizza. We just happen to have had a large Italian population so we have a lot of pizza.
> And, unlike New Yorkers seem to believe, pizza wasn't invented in the land of burguers and hotdogs
Which version of pizza are you talking about? Apple didn't technically invent the first smartphone, and yet it did create and popularize the smartphone as the world knows it today.
The US also didn't actually invent putting cooked beef between two slices of bread. It popularized and spread the hamburger globally. What the world came to know as a hamburger, came from the US.
Pizza, as with so many commercialized things, was popularized around the globe by the US, not by Italy. That's not something up for debate, it's not subtly the case, the US massively popularized pizza as the world knows it today. It wasn't the classic, bland Italian version of 'pizza' that stormed around the world, it was the amped up commercialized US approach to pizza: which involved an epic explosion of variation of every possible sort, delivered by chains. That's what rapidly spread pizza to every corner of the globe post WW2. The US created the modern pizza chain and spread it globally, using its vast economic reach and capital, introducing pizza to billions of people in the process. Pizza was popularized globally by the US in exactly the same way the US popularized hamburgers.
His method of making sauce made a HUUGE difference in my own pizza making.
I don't do quite all the way as removing all the seeds, but I immersion blend canned San Marzano tomatoes and then strain all the liquid out of it, keeping only the pulp.
Also check out https://www.pizzamaking.com/forum/index.php which is a treasure trove of pizza experiments. Varasano himself was active on the forum back in the day (~2005) and a few members actually started their own pizzerias.
There is something to admire when a person goes all-in on trying to perfect a method or recipe.
Conversely, I also think a lot of people completely lose themselves in the process and forget when to say "enough is enough". It's just pizza, not some priceless work of art.
I've found a pretty good recipe for pizza in a home oven, it's closer to Pizza Tonda Romana than Neapolitan, hence also similar to NY style pizza.
In baker's percentages, it's high gluten flour and 60-65% water, 1-3% salt, 1-2% olive oil and 0.2-0.5% instant dry yeast. Play around with how wet/dry you think it should be.
The important parts are the olive oil (which helps browning in an ordinary oven), kneading until you can windowpane the dough, and letting it rest portioned and covered at least 12 hours in the fridge.
Shape, top and bake at the highest temp your oven can go, a pizza stone or steel is nice, but not mandatory. A sheet tray or a cast iron pan turned upside down also both work great.
I like making pizza baking a social activity, everyone in the kitchen, selecting toppings and eating the super hot pizza straight out of the oven, while preparing the next one.
Like many things in life, it can be worth it to take a step back and a simpler approach, with a better effort:result factor.
Yea. His legal disclaimer is necessary. Modding your oven interlocks for pizza..
There are good small high-temp pizza oven options. If you care enough about the quality you're heading to something in that space, or building out a brick furnace in the backyard.
I think home pizza is great. I love making it, but its nothing on the stuff i get from the two italian joints up the road, professionals get better results.
Same with coffee: I'd rather pay a competent barista.. But if I lived in the woods in vermont I might feel different: and I'd have room to make a pizza oven too!
If you live in a unit with a wired in oven, and you mod your oven to cook on the clean cycle.. your home insurance is probably void. If you rent: you're probably now in breach of your rental agreement.
Not getting his results, we pre-heat some ceramic (we use a plate but friends went to the hardware store and got a large clay floortile) and this, combined with direct radiant heat from the elements, gets a pretty good outcome: fast cook base and crispy finish on the toppings.
Also: this americanism to refer to Pizza PIE. Thats Chicago, and is abhorrent sloppy nonsense. I've had one. its tomato sauce in a piecrust. its like eating lukewarm dense tomato soup with cheese topping. I can't imagine why people do this except I also gross out on dirty fries so I kind-of get it, its comfort food for the locals. But anywhere else, pizza means thin crust, and arguments about how much beyond basil and cheese goes on it.
(I am australian. I do not put pineapple on pizza. Tandoori Lamb is pretty good mind you.)
One subtle hack I picked up on was "stealing" yeast from a pizzeria you like. I envision someone subtly coming in with a paper cup of the same kind the pizza joint uses, but it's filled with flour water, leaving it next to them as they eat, trying not to accidentally drink it by mistake, and going home with their prized culture.
TIL: "There is no need to dissolve the yeast in warm water or feed it sugar. 'Proofing' the yeast was probably required decades ago, but I've never had yeast that didn't activate. The yeast feeds on the flour so you don't need to put in sugar. The proofing step that you see in many recipes is really an old wives tale at this point."
I find deep dives like this fascinating. I am absolutely the kind of person who could get this 'into' something if it were what I really wanted to be into, at least for a time, so even though I'll probably never put in the effort to implement Jeff Varasano's recipe, I respect it. I'm absolutely glued to reading this. It seems like his restaurants are successful; I wish him luck.
I will say that personally, I treat Good pizza, like this or a "tomato pie" from a great place, as a fundamentally different thing from "Bad" pizza, the kind your cheap local chain sells. (Fast food pizza from Domino's or whomever is just not something I normally consume.) There is a place in the world for "bad", bready pizza with crazy toppings and whatever else. It just isn't what I want when I want the Good stuff.
For anyone interested in more of this type of pizza party, there's an excellent book called American Pie by Peter Reinhardt. Has an excellent overview of the scene at the time (the book is from 03) and a ton of theory/recipes for making perfect pizza.
One of his oven hacks I remember is getting plain tiles from a flooring wholesaler (be careful, you can't just get any kind and I don't have the book handy to look it up) and line the oven with them to retain heat and increase the temp.
[+] [-] ncmncm|4 years ago|reply
I did most of the stuff on this page (short of breaking my self-cleaning lock). It is all great advice, and if you follow it and practice a lot, you can make great pizzas and wow your guests.
BUT! After you have done that, you can also violate all the rules and still get great pizzas. Once, I was in Waipio Valley in Hawaii, with just Pillsbury white flour, bread yeast, a block of cheddar cheese, Wesson oil, tomato paste, fresh oregano, and spring water. To bake I had a gas oven with the rack out, a tall soup pot, inverted with a big skillet also inverted over it, close under the broiler. The pizzas came out fantastic! I could only make them 9" across, so I ended up making 30+ of them.
I had no peel. My dough was very, very wet; I scooped enough for each pizza with a big kitchen spoon, spread it out on parchment, drizzled Wesson, smeared tomato, sprinkled oregano, salt, and cheddar, slid it onto the skillet, and started on the next one.
The one thing you mustn't ever neglect is letting the flour and water proof for 40+ minutes before you work it.
To get decent pizza at almost any American restaurant, you have to insist "burn it!" or they will be afraid you will get mad about a little charring, and so undercook it the way Americans demand. You have to tell them that if it bends, it's not done enough.
[+] [-] eps|4 years ago|reply
Thicker foccacia-style pizzas are very easy and come out right on the first try, but thin crust pizzas at the very least require an oven that can go above 300c and that's very rare.
> letting the flour and water proof
Autolyse.
[+] [-] stronglikedan|4 years ago|reply
Yup. We had a great pizza chain called Anthony's Coal Fired Pizza, that would cook the pizza "well done". Apparently, they had enough complaints that they now under-cook it by default, unless you explicitly ask them to "burn it". Unfortunately, the new ownership that made that change (that Anthony refused to make for years), also made some other changes that took them from "great" to just "good".
[+] [-] slothtrop|4 years ago|reply
I just leave dough on the counter for 22-24 hours, room temperature, i.e. the Jim Lahey method. In rabid pizza forums the prevailing wisdom seems to be that cold-rise is inferior to that. However I'm not taking into account the other aspects of the technique.
Since I oven-bake at 550F my dough isn't nearly as wet. Still comes out quite flavorful. I don't autolyse before kneading however, and might endeavor to start doing so.
[+] [-] cannabis_sam|4 years ago|reply
This is the secret, combined with stretching the gluten without tearing the dough, and giving the dough enough time to slowly rise (e.g in a fridge overnight).
(Basically make Pan Cristal dough for your pizza )
[+] [-] dominik-2020|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|4 years ago|reply
1. This guy has it right where he doesn't cook the sauce first. To many people use a cooked pasta style sauce on pizza. It's just not right.
2. This website has that classic, 1998, don't give a shit, just a bunch of HTML and IMG tags look. Love it.
It's just a massive amount of information on a single page.
[+] [-] leephillips|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mushufasa|4 years ago|reply
The current reality of technical literacy, despite the information on html being accessible, is so far from that original ideal.
[+] [-] jpmattia|4 years ago|reply
And no BS. I kinda miss the old web.
[+] [-] hardwaregeek|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylan604|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r3trohack3r|4 years ago|reply
My favorite step is “jailbreaking” your home oven with a pair of bolt cutters to use the cleaning cycle to get pizza oven temps.
> I've cook good pizzas at temps under 725F, but never a great one. The cabinet of most ovens is obviously designed for serious heat because the cleaning cycle will top out at over 975 which is the max reading on my Raytec digital infrared thermometer. The outside of the cabinet doesn't even get up to 85F when the oven is at 800 inside. So I clipped off the lock using garden shears so I could run it on the cleaning cycle. I pushed a piece of aluminum foil into the door latch (the door light switch) so that electronics don't think I've broken some rule by opening the door when it thinks it's locked.
[+] [-] handrous|4 years ago|reply
I just don't want people reading this thread to think you can't make really good pizza at home without buying a bunch of stuff or resorting to modding your stove. You can even make pan pizzas, so you don't have to buy a stone or any of that. More steps[0] but it works, and makes a better pizza than any major chain, with no special equipment whatsoever and very little mess.
[0] Pre-heat oven, lightly oil pan, build pizza in cold pan, heat pan on stove top until oil's been sizzling for a minute or so, cook in oven for ~5-10 minutes, turn on the broiler to finish the top when it's almost done—or hit the top with an electric heat gun or butane torch from your garage while it's heating on the stove top at the beginning, for finer control and to save time by skipping the broiler.
[+] [-] geoka9|4 years ago|reply
If you have a baking steel, you can trick your oven into heating it well above the temperatures it normally allows. Place the steel very close to the broiler (leaving as little space as you can squeeze your pizza in) and leave the door slightly ajar. That little space will heat up high enough to make a "Neapolitan style" pizza in a home oven a possibility.
P.S. I've successfully done this; use this advice at your own risk :)
[+] [-] tomatotomato37|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inasio|4 years ago|reply
Regarding recipes, Margarita is my go-to, more or less same sauce recipe, but I add a full ball of Burratta once out of the oven (too soft to even need to cook it).
[+] [-] teruakohatu|4 years ago|reply
Which version of it do you own? Have you found it useful for anything else? They seem to advertise cooking steak on it... Which I am skeptical of compared to a pan.
[+] [-] tudelo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw0101a|4 years ago|reply
This is all well and good, but given that it's mostly carbs (bread), how are you not hungry a short time later? Or do you have it for lunch, so you only have to last a few hours until supper/dinner?
I find that unless I have some protein/meat (which takes longer to digest?), my satiety doesn't last.
[+] [-] Arjuna|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://youtu.be/0VfGnvHRXu0
[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0812870972
[+] [-] SeanLuke|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slow_donkey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diego_moita|4 years ago|reply
Cooks think cooking is music, with endless variations and interpretations.
There are very few cooks or musicians in this forum.
[+] [-] kelnos|4 years ago|reply
Personally, I tend to agree with Varasano: I've never been to Naples, but I have been to Rome, and to my tastebuds, even US-cooked Neapolitan pizza is better than Roman pizza. But that's just it: that's just my opinion, based on my taste. Take it or leave it. You'll choose to leave it, no doubt, and that's ok.
> there are now many DC Neapolitan pizzerias of very high grade
This was written in 2008, so more recent establishments of course won't be listed.
[+] [-] TylerE|4 years ago|reply
It was ok... but overpriced and really nothing special. I've had better pizza at dozens of places.
[+] [-] smt88|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Hypergraphe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
Jeff Varasano's Famous New York Pizza Recipe (2008) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14289307 - May 2017 (145 comments)
How an Engineer Does Pizza - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2023280 - Dec 2010 (88 comments)
The Perfect Pizza - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1464760 - June 2010 (5 comments)
[+] [-] diego_moita|4 years ago|reply
But for those more into the traditional original bread-like Neapolitan style I strongly suggest using a sourdough based dough, like Tartine's[0]
Bear in mind: this is cooking, not engineering, not math. And, unlike New Yorkers seem to believe, pizza wasn't invented in the land of burguers and hotdogs.
Wherever there are Italian immigrants there are variations in pizza all over the world, from Chicago (deep dish) to Sao Paulo (stuffed border, "coroa de pizza"), from Liguria (piscialandrea) to Sicily (sfincione), from Rome (al taglio) to Naples, etc.
[0] https://food52.com/recipes/64201-tartine-s-pizza-dough
Edit: to open your mind I'd suggest "The wild pizzas of Southern Italy": https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-15/the-wild-...
[+] [-] handrous|4 years ago|reply
Getting started making decent pizza at home is as simple and easy as a bread machine and a cast iron pan (or two).
(pro tip: get small cans of tomato sauce or crushed tomato [yes, use canned] and mix salt, way more black pepper than seems right, and some oregano [fresh is great if you have it, but dried is fine], directly in the can. Boom, nearly zero mess [one spoon, perhaps] sauce, on the cheap, and it's good. You don't need to pre-cook it, just put it directly on as is. You won't be able to beat this cheap, lazy method by too much unless you've got garden-grown sauce tomatoes)
[EDIT] other pro tip: you can build a pizza on your peel while another's in the oven provided you have a large cutting board. The pizza coming off the stone will be stiff enough that you can just shove it onto the cutting board. A peel provides little benefit for taking a pizza off a stone in a normal home oven, though it is very nice for putting it on. Further pro tip: avoid pretty, finished wood peels. Smooth-finished wood makes the dough stick way worse.
[+] [-] OJFord|4 years ago|reply
I somewhat understand the first, knowing that America has an aversion to mass-based (or even standard volumetric) measurements in recipes, so the alternative really is either an unreasonable number of tablespoons, or an unreasonably precise number of cups.
The latter however is pure nonsense. 'Bread flour', aka 'strong', is so named for relatively high protein content (gluten-producing capability). '00 flour' aka 'super-fine' refers to how finely it's milled; used particularly for pasta and has its proponents for pizza.
Orthogonal concepts. As a substitution chain it basically just reads 'flour' but in a way that implies any speciality is better than plain/'AP'.
[+] [-] MisterTea|4 years ago|reply
Um, yeah. As a life long New Yorker I, and most anyone I know, are well aware of the origins of pizza. We just happen to have had a large Italian population so we have a lot of pizza.
[+] [-] fartcannon|4 years ago|reply
I believe the interest in Neapolitan is an response to pizza being marketed at children for years in NA.
Similarily, comic-sans is perfectly acceptable font. Stop pretending you don't enjoy things you enjoy.
Like pineapple on pizza!!
[+] [-] geoka9|4 years ago|reply
Nowadays Neapolitan pizza (in Naples) is rarely made with sourdough though. It's usually fresh yeast.
[+] [-] alasdair_|4 years ago|reply
The article says the same thing.
[+] [-] adventured|4 years ago|reply
Which version of pizza are you talking about? Apple didn't technically invent the first smartphone, and yet it did create and popularize the smartphone as the world knows it today.
The US also didn't actually invent putting cooked beef between two slices of bread. It popularized and spread the hamburger globally. What the world came to know as a hamburger, came from the US.
Pizza, as with so many commercialized things, was popularized around the globe by the US, not by Italy. That's not something up for debate, it's not subtly the case, the US massively popularized pizza as the world knows it today. It wasn't the classic, bland Italian version of 'pizza' that stormed around the world, it was the amped up commercialized US approach to pizza: which involved an epic explosion of variation of every possible sort, delivered by chains. That's what rapidly spread pizza to every corner of the globe post WW2. The US created the modern pizza chain and spread it globally, using its vast economic reach and capital, introducing pizza to billions of people in the process. Pizza was popularized globally by the US in exactly the same way the US popularized hamburgers.
[+] [-] raspyberr|4 years ago|reply
Put a grill (top-down) on highest heat.
Put a frying pan on a hob on the highest heat.
Stretch out your dough and place it on the frying pan.
Put on sauce, cheese, and toppings.
Couple of minutes later check underneath.
Put the frying pan under the grill for a couple of minutes.
Taa daa. Like it was made in a pizza oven.
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CarVac|4 years ago|reply
I don't do quite all the way as removing all the seeds, but I immersion blend canned San Marzano tomatoes and then strain all the liquid out of it, keeping only the pulp.
[+] [-] slow_donkey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KozmoNau7|4 years ago|reply
Conversely, I also think a lot of people completely lose themselves in the process and forget when to say "enough is enough". It's just pizza, not some priceless work of art.
I've found a pretty good recipe for pizza in a home oven, it's closer to Pizza Tonda Romana than Neapolitan, hence also similar to NY style pizza.
In baker's percentages, it's high gluten flour and 60-65% water, 1-3% salt, 1-2% olive oil and 0.2-0.5% instant dry yeast. Play around with how wet/dry you think it should be.
The important parts are the olive oil (which helps browning in an ordinary oven), kneading until you can windowpane the dough, and letting it rest portioned and covered at least 12 hours in the fridge.
Shape, top and bake at the highest temp your oven can go, a pizza stone or steel is nice, but not mandatory. A sheet tray or a cast iron pan turned upside down also both work great.
I like making pizza baking a social activity, everyone in the kitchen, selecting toppings and eating the super hot pizza straight out of the oven, while preparing the next one.
Like many things in life, it can be worth it to take a step back and a simpler approach, with a better effort:result factor.
[+] [-] ggm|4 years ago|reply
There are good small high-temp pizza oven options. If you care enough about the quality you're heading to something in that space, or building out a brick furnace in the backyard.
I think home pizza is great. I love making it, but its nothing on the stuff i get from the two italian joints up the road, professionals get better results.
Same with coffee: I'd rather pay a competent barista.. But if I lived in the woods in vermont I might feel different: and I'd have room to make a pizza oven too!
If you live in a unit with a wired in oven, and you mod your oven to cook on the clean cycle.. your home insurance is probably void. If you rent: you're probably now in breach of your rental agreement.
Not getting his results, we pre-heat some ceramic (we use a plate but friends went to the hardware store and got a large clay floortile) and this, combined with direct radiant heat from the elements, gets a pretty good outcome: fast cook base and crispy finish on the toppings.
Also: this americanism to refer to Pizza PIE. Thats Chicago, and is abhorrent sloppy nonsense. I've had one. its tomato sauce in a piecrust. its like eating lukewarm dense tomato soup with cheese topping. I can't imagine why people do this except I also gross out on dirty fries so I kind-of get it, its comfort food for the locals. But anywhere else, pizza means thin crust, and arguments about how much beyond basil and cheese goes on it.
(I am australian. I do not put pineapple on pizza. Tandoori Lamb is pretty good mind you.)
[+] [-] kortex|4 years ago|reply
Also, TIL the word "poolish."
[+] [-] Confiks|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ivraatiems|4 years ago|reply
I will say that personally, I treat Good pizza, like this or a "tomato pie" from a great place, as a fundamentally different thing from "Bad" pizza, the kind your cheap local chain sells. (Fast food pizza from Domino's or whomever is just not something I normally consume.) There is a place in the world for "bad", bready pizza with crazy toppings and whatever else. It just isn't what I want when I want the Good stuff.
[+] [-] jiinga|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soupfordummies|4 years ago|reply
One of his oven hacks I remember is getting plain tiles from a flooring wholesaler (be careful, you can't just get any kind and I don't have the book handy to look it up) and line the oven with them to retain heat and increase the temp.
[+] [-] tech-historian|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] soupfordummies|4 years ago|reply
This post is one of those rare hidden gems that make you go "OH YEAH! Forgot about that! What am I waiting for!"