Italian · Main
Pizza Margherita
- Advanced
- 1 h 30 m
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
Leads with fresh herbs arguing happily on top, richness that coats and comforts, with a bitter-edged char at the rim.
Ingredients
- 500g bread flour
- 325g water (65%)
- 10g salt, 3g instant yeast
- Crushed San Marzano tomatoes
- Fresh mozzarella, torn and drained
- Basil, olive oil
The skills inside
FermentationProofing: the rise before the ovenResting dough: the pause that does the work
The words inside
Fermentation in Bread: Yeast, Levain, PrefermentsMozzarella di Bufala CampanaDehydrator, Ferment Station & the Pantry MachinesTomatoes: The Argument for August
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Mix dough, rest 20 min, knead briefly until smooth; cold-ferment 24–72 h for flavor (or 2 h warm). 20 min
- Divide into 4 balls; proof 2 h at room temp. Preheat a steel or stone at max heat 45 min. 120 min
- Stretch from the center out, keeping a rim. Top sparingly: tomato, mozzarella, oil.
- Bake 6–8 min until leopard-spotted; finish with basil. 8 min
How it should come out
- The rim has risen to roughly a thumb's width and is brown-gold with scattered darker blisters across it. A home oven will not give Naples' full leopard char in six to eight minutes; what you do not accept is a flat, uniformly tan rim with no blistering anywhere: that is a steel that never got hot enough.
- A slice held by the rim tips but does not fold back on itself; the underside is spotted brown through the dry flour, with no raw white centre.
- The toppings are sparse enough to read as separate things: bare dough visible between the pieces of mozzarella, tomato a thin skim rather than a lid. The centre is dry when it lands: no standing water, no ring of whey around the cheese.
- Torn open, the rim is glossy and open with holes running up into the crust; a tight, even crumb in the rim means it was pressed flat during the stretch.
- The basil is bright green and merely wilted, never blackened or frazzled, and the mozzarella has just begun to spot and blister rather than browning into a sheet.
Where it goes wrong The ball is stretched cold and tight straight from the fridge before it has relaxed: it fights back, springs closed at the rim and thins to a tear at the centre, and it bakes with a pale, springy, undersized cornicione and a bare patch of scorched sauce where the hole opened.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chianti Classico or Barbera d’Alba
- Also Right
- Vermentino for the lighter plates
- From the Taps
- Italian pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- San Pellegrino Sanbittèr
Tomato’s acid demands equal acid: Italian reds evolved beside the sauce, and the regional pairing is the safest law in wine.
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