In summer 2010, I was on a very important mission: To make a perfect pizza napoletana in our wood fire pizza oven.

I am specifically interested in the dough, I wanted to have my own dough recipe since we had very inconsistent results when using ready-made dough. But the most important part is that making your own dough is a lot of fun, I love working with yeast, it’s fascinating.

So when I started with my own dough, I ran into a lot of problems. From non-raising dough to dough sticking to the surface so hard that it was impossible to get off. Very frustrating. But now I am at a stage where I feel comfortable sharing my experience, the pizza was deemed extremely delicious by my family and they start invited friends to try it :) I like that.

I also should notice that I am extremely thankful to my father, who bought the pizza oven, built it into our beautiful pergola in Ticino, Switzerland and now even agreed to buying me a kitchen aid ;)

But now for the process. Here’s the short version:

1. Find enough people willing to eat pizza so it’s worth heating the oven (easy, there are always takers)
2. Start making the dough (if you want to use a biga, you need to start with that 12 hours before)
3. Heat the pizza oven
4. Get the ingredients ready while the dough rises and the pizza oven heats up
5. Make the pizza
6. Bake
7. Serve and eat

Ok, now for the long version. I will mainly focus on making the dough and heating the pizza oven since these are the crucial parts in my opinion.

The dough

The dough is a diva. It can mess up your pizza in many different ways: By not rising, tasting sour, sticking to the working surface or oven, being soggy, or just tasting pale. The taste is up to personal preferences, but you want the dough to rise properly and of course you want to be able to get into and out of the oven. Here’s how I do it:

Ingredients

500g tipo “00″ flour (very finely ground flour)
360g water
1/2 cube fresh yeast or 4 tsp dried yeast
4 tsp liquid sugar (or honey)
3 to 4 tsp salt

Step 1: Starter

I like to give the yeast some time to activate. Basically what you do is mixing some of the flour, water, yeast and all the sugar before putting the rest, and most importantly, before putting any of the salt. I usually use 200g flour, 160g water, half of the yeast, and all of the sugar. Mix it lightly (you don’t really need the kitchen aid here, just use a spoon) and leave it rest for 30 minutes, 2 hours, 12 hours – try a bit what you like, this process will change the taste. My favourite is using fresh yeast and resting the starter 45 minutes.

And yes, I do use sugar. I agree with Jeff Varasano that it’s not really necessary, but my test eaters found the dough with sugar to be more delicious. Sorry Jeff :)

Step 2: Dough

Now bring in the rest of the ingredients. I add the salt last and before adding it, I mix the dough a bit. Or just add the salt at the side of the bowl so it doesn’t get in direct contact with the yeast, otherwise it will destroy it. Mix the dough for 8 to 10 minutes, it should be elastic but note that it might not come off the bowl, as described in other recipes. A good idea is to add the flour gradually into the mixture, it will yield a more elastic dough. After mixing, leave to rest for 15 minutes or something. Lightly flour your working surface and empty the bowl on it (see picture above), with the help of a spatula. Using your hands, form a roll so you can split the dough into 4 portions. Now knead each portion individually by hand for a minute or something. You need to work quickly or it will stick to your surface. Avoid adding to much flour, if you knead quickly, it won’t stick. Create a ball with each portion and place it on a lightly floured try. I also use parchment paper or baking sheets.

You need to rest the dough now for 2 hours at room temperature. Cover the balls with a wet / damp kitchen cloth to avoid drying out.

Technically, the temperature you let the dough rise matters a lot. We usually have 23° Celsius in our apartment and I never let it rise for more than two hours, in fact two hours is perfect. If it’s hotter, it will rise quicker. If colder, you might want to leave it longer. Just try to see what works best for you.

It is very important that you rest the dough in individual portions. If you cut into the balls after you rested the dough, it will stick to your surface. And what’s more important, you pop the air bubbles the yeast made for you, which will result in a heavy dough that did not rise properly. If you only take one advice from this post, let it be this one!

Step 3: Spreading the dough

This is the part I am bad at. I like perfectly round pizzas but I always need to cheat a bit in order to achieve that. Fortunately, the shape of the pie has no influence to the end result. In fact, it’s important to focus on other things when spreading the dough. First of all, please do not use a rolling pin. It would destroy your and the yeast’s hard hard work and patience when preparing the dough because you will pop the air bubbles. Use your hands. Second, don’t press the dough into the shape (I know, I’m doing it in the picture), but rather stretch it. It’s difficult and I guess it just needs a lot of exercise.

Make sure you dust your surface with flour. Depending on the material of your surface, it needs quite a bit of flour or the dough will stick. But if you respected my before mentioned point of not cutting into the dough after it rose, you should be fine. If you did cut into the balls, you are lost anyway. You need so much flour and have to re-knead your dough that the outcome will be bad, i.e., the pie will not rise.

In my experience, it’s okay to leave the dough spread for a couple of minutes. When using an electrical oven in your kitchen, I think it even gives you a better result if you wait for 15 minutes before putting the sauce. Probably because it gives the yeast some time to produce more air, I’m not sure.

Step 4: Toppings

That’s the easiest and best part. A true Pizza Napoletana only has tomato sauce, mozzarella, a bit of parmesan and a few leaves of basil. That’s good but boring :) So do whatever you want. Still, there are a few things to consider.

Tomato Sauce

Don’t use a cooked tomato sauce. The tomatoes will cook on the pizza and if you use a cooked sauce, it will be cooked twice. Basically you only need mashed tomatoes with a bit of seasoning. Use canned tomatoes, they are good and bring out a special taste. I usually go for a ready made pizza sauce from Cirio, it’s really good. That’s why I also don’t have experience with other sauces or making my own.

One thing that is important: The moment you put the tomato sauce on, your dough will suck up the liquid. And it will not rise when soaked. So once you put the tomato sauce, you have to be quick. Prepare all ingredients first, then put the tomato sauce, mozzarella and spices and immediately get that thing into the oven, the quicker, the better. It makes a difference.

Mozzarella

The mozzarella needs to be dry, otherwise there will be to much liquid on the pizza and it will be soggy, the dough will cook and not rise properly. So make sure when you get a pack of mozzarella stored in water, drained it a few hours before using. I usually wrap it in paper towel and put it back into the fridge. The longer, the better, and if necessary, change the sheets! It really makes a difference. You should also avoid using any sort of grated mozzarella or special pizza mozzarella (which is not stored in water). You get the best results when using a mozzarella ball that comes in water and drain it.

You don’t need to cut the balls with a knive. You can, but I think it’s cooler when you tear them into pieces. If you take care of the structure of the mozzarella ball, you can make thin slices with your hands.

Other toppings

I like using fresh thyme, oregano and basil. I chop them and put them as the last thing on my pie. You can also put the basil after baking, which makes a nice picture. Apart from that, I use salt and pepper for seasoning.

Then of course you can put more things. My dad likes pineapple and ham. My brother prefers thinly sliced meat (veal or beef). I like to put salmon, or just some vegetables such as peppers or zucchini. What’s also good is to put ruccola (arugula) after baking the pizza. If you are using parma ham, you should also put it after baking.

The Oven

Working with a wood fire oven is trickier than we initially assumed. The key for a good pizza is high temperature. But other things can go wrong when baking the pizza, here are a few pointers that will make your pizza baking experience a great one.

Heating the oven

This takes time! 90 minutes easily, maybe more. If my father is around, it’s his job to heat the oven. Basically you go on about it just like with any other wood fire oven: You build a fire and wait while adding more wood. There is one indicator that tells you when the oven approaches the required temperature: The dome of the oven should be white. But that is still no guarantee for high temperature. The most important thing we learned was that unlike grilling meat, you need a fire when baking the pizza. You need the flames, you need to put fresh wood just before inserting the pizza. Fire is much hotter than embers, but embers is better at preserving heat. You might want a combination of that, which you will have anyway when heating the oven for 90 minutes.

As for the temperature, I’d say the higher, the better. You want your pizza to be baked in 2 or 3 minutes and in order to achieve that, you need at least 300 °C (570 °F). I would love to have more, like 400 °C (750 °F) and it should be certainly doable, but my father fears that it will blow our pizza oven. Maybe I try it anyway because I don’t think it will.

Reaching this kind of temperature with wood is not easy. You need logs of wood with high heating value, such as birch wood or oak wood (check out the table on wikipedia). We are pretty sure that restaurants use a combination of wood and gas to keep the temperature high enough, because it’s really difficult.

Baking

Baking the pizza involves one tricky part: Getting the pizza away from the working surface and into the oven. Here again it pays off to work quickly, the longer you leave the dough with its toppings, the soggier and thus stickier it will be. Also, if you cut the dough into pieces after the proofing, it will stick and it’s best to fold the pizza into some sort of calzone. Not as nice looking, but still good and at least you don’t have to throw it away.

So, to get the pizza from the surface into the oven, you need a pizza spatula. Ours is made of steel, it’s very thin and works well. Be confident when pushing the spatula under the pie, it works better with some drive. My brother invented a vibration technique he applies when the dough sticks (back in the days when I split the dough after proofing). That actually saved us a few pies. What he did was quickly moving the spatula to and fro, the best vibrating you can do with your hands.

If you had no problems getting the pizza onto the spatula, it will also come off easily. I don’t need to go into details here, just put it into the oven and close the door. Our oven is big enough for two, maybe three pizzas at a time. That’s perfectly okay, if it only takes a few minutes to bake you have 6 or 8 pizzas ready in no time.

If your oven temperature is below 300 °C (570 °F) and maybe even if it’s above, you should turn your pizzas halfway into the baking, so all sides are baked evenly. The easiest way to do it is using your hands, if you are quick it won’t be too hot. But you can also use the spatula, you need to figure out the technique yourself.

Serving the pizza

You finally made it to the most rewarding moment, serving the pizza to the hungry crowd. Don’t forget to put the basil leaves if using. Maybe you want to cut the pizza and serve only the slices, so nobody has to wait but in our family, since everybody has her or his individual pizza, that does not work.

What always amazes me is how quickly the pizzas are gone! It usually takes me 4 hours or more for the whole process and after 10 minutes, the pizzas are gone. I take it as a good sign though.

I hope you have as much fun as I do when making pizza. People come a long way for my pizza and I welcome everybody to come and try ;)