Making Artisan Pizza at Home E-Book

Philip Dennhardt

• Herausgeber: Ryland Peters & Small
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 307

Beschreibung

Over 90 recipes for freshly baked artisan pizzas with delicious, seasonally inspired toppings. Saturday Pizzas started as a small pop-up restaurant at the famous Ballymaloe Cookery School. The idea was such a success that the pop-up pizzeria has been going for nearly 15 years, and is considered something of an institution within Ireland. In this book the man behind this thriving enterprise shares his secrets for making exceptional pizza in 90 of his favourite recipes. The first chapter Getting Started gives information on equipment, ingredients and cooking in both a domestic oven and a wood burning stove. The second chapter, Dough, gives guidance on making dough by hand or machine and recipes for Sourdough, Spelt and Gluten-Free. Sauces and Extras include delicious condiments such as Red Onion Jam and Hollandaise Butter. The main pizza recipes are then divided into Our Flagship Pizzas, which classics such as Margherita and Pepperoni. Then comes meaty options with Sausage, Cured Meat and Roast Meat Pizzas. Seafood Pizzas features delicious, fresh ideas like Smoked Salmon with Capers and Crème fraîche. A long list of Vegetarian Pizzas includes Roast pumpkin with Fennel and Walnut Pesto. There are also chapters on Calzone, Fruit Pizzas and Dessert Pizzas to finish. Making Artisan Pizza at Home is a fantastic new edition of the previously published Saturday Pizzas from the Ballymaloe Cookery School.

Leseprobe

Making

Artisan Pizza

at Home

Making

Artisan Pizza

at Home

Over 90 delicious recipes for bases and seasonal toppings

PHILIP DENNHARDT

and KRISTIN JENSEN

photography by Mowie Kay

Dedication

For DMO – we laughed and cried together

Recipe writer and developer Kristin Jensen

Senior Designer Barbara Zuñiga

Editor Alice Sambrook

Text Editors Jane Bamforth and Lesley Malkin

Head of Production Patricia Harrington

Editorial Director Julia Charles

Art Director Leslie Harrington

Publisher Cindy Richards

Food Stylists Emily Kidd and Maud Eden

Prop Stylist Jo Harris

Indexer Hilary Bird

Originally published in 2017 as Saturday Pizzas from the Ballymaloe Cookery School.

This revised edition published in 2022 by

Ryland Peters & Small

20–21 Jockey’s Fields

London WC1R 4BW

and

341 E 116th Street

New York, 10029

www.rylandpeters.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Text copyright © Philip Dennhardt 2017, 2022.

Design and commissioned photography copyright © Ryland Peters & Small 2017, 2022. Image on page 10 supplied courtesy of The Ballymaloe Cookery School copyright © Tim Allen.

The author’s moral rights have been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-78879-426-8

EISBN: 978-1-78879-453-4

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. US Library of Congress CIP data has been applied for.

Printed in China

Notes

• Both metric and imperial (plus US cup measurements) are included in this book, but it is important to work with one set of measurements only and not alternate between the two within a recipe. However, the authors recommend that all ingredients are weighed rather than measured in cups where possible (for more detail, see pages 15 and 23).

• Oven temperatures given are for fan-assisted ovens.

• One 7 g (¼ oz) sachet of fast action dried yeast is equivalent to 2¼ teaspoons.

• All eggs are UK large/US extra-large.

contents

Foreword

Introduction

Getting started

Dough and bread

Sauces and extras

THE PIZZAS

Sausage pizzas

Cured meat pizzas

Roast meat pizzas

Seafood pizzas

Vegetable pizzas

Calzones and panzerotti

Fruit and dessert pizzas

Index

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Darina Allen, Ballymaloe Cookery School

It’s such a joy for me to write a foreword to this book for many reasons, not least because Philip, who is married to my youngest daughter Emily, has breathed new life into the wood-fired oven that I bought back in the 1980s. There is a special magic to cooking in a wood-burning oven. It takes considerable skill to build a fire, judge the heat and feed extra logs of dry timber to keep the embers glowing at the correct temperature to cook the food to perfection. It needs to be super-hot to cook a thin-crust pizza in three minutes or less, so that it has a crisp base, a bubbly crust and a meltingly flavourful topping.

The highly esteemed authors Marcella and Victor Hazan introduced me to this kind of cooking on my first trip to Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy. I was intrigued by the idea of having an outdoor bread oven in a vineyard and longed to have one at the Ballymaloe Cookery School. After a lot of research, which took me from the west coast of California to the River Café in London and eventually, on the recommendation of American chef Alice Waters, back to the source in Italy, we bought a kit from Valoriani, a company that is renowned for the quality of its ovens.

In 2007 Philip came to us with an idea for a pop-up pizzeria on Saturdays and wondered whether we would be happy for him to experiment in the wood-fired oven in the Garden Café at the school. We’re always excited by a new venture, so of course we said yes.

Philip hankered after those delicious pizzas he had tasted in California and was excited about incorporating the fresh organic produce from our farm and gardens with fish and shellfish from the nearby fishing village at Ballycotton. He made a pilgrimage to Italy and tasted pizzas from Rome to Naples. Back home, he experimented with flours and doughs until he was happy with the crust. The result delighted us all and soon Saturday Pizzas had a cult following. There was always a Margherita and pepperoni, but also a new vegetarian and non-vegetarian pizza, reflecting the seasons. Philip is meticulous about his research, recording each week’s specials and tweaking the recipes. He is always creative and inspired by the fresh ingredients, artisan produce and foraged foods around us, and every Saturday we look forward to the specials.

One day Philip told me that he would love to write a pizza cookbook and the next thing I know, he asked me to write the foreword. Now here it is, a beautifully written book that will inspire even those who have never made a pizza before to have a go. And you don’t need to own a wood-burning oven – you can get excellent results in a conventional oven. As I read through Philip’s mouth-watering recipes, I couldn’t help thinking how far pizza has come since I was at hotel and catering college in Dublin in the early 1960s. Pizza was a very precise thing: a base slathered with a concentrated tomato sauce, topped with a lattice of anchovy fillets with a black olive in the centre of every diamond. It never occurred to me to experiment with alternative toppings until I tasted Wolfgang Puck’s beautiful thin-crust pizza topped with shrimp, fresh tomato and basil leaves at a reception in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s. It was a eureka moment.

The fun continues every week with Philip’s carefully chosen combinations. Some are traditional, but there are some unorthodox concoctions too, such as apple and black pudding, or braised beef with BBQ sauce and pickled red onions, perhaps finished with a drizzle of homemade aioli, hoisin sauce, gremolata or tapenade and served with a salad of organic leaves with edible flowers on top.

When you start making your own pizza, there’s no end to the fun. Once you have made the dough, there are many more options than just pizza. You can make calzone, sfincione, stromboli, panzerotti, piadina, sgabei … the list goes on. I hope you will be inspired by Philip to release your inner pizzaiolo.

INTRODUCTION

How it all began: From master butcher to Berkeley to Ballymaloe

I was the fourth generation of my family to train as a master butcher in Germany, so I never dreamed that one day I’d end up making pizza in Ireland. When I was 18 I decided to do the three-year apprenticeship to see what might come of it, even though I already knew it wasn’t what I wanted to do with my life. Out of 3,000 students, I finished with the highest marks, but I still felt that it was time to do something different. I was thinking of studying economics, but when my former boss heard about my plan, he said, ‘Philip, don’t do it. There’s a job in New York, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.’ He was right. When would I ever get the chance to live and work in New York again? So I took it.

One day I was standing on 42nd Street waiting for a friend when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned around and standing there was an Irish girl from work. To cut a long story short, when the job ended, I moved back to Ireland with her. It turned out that the Irish girl I’d fallen in love with was the daughter of Darina Allen, founder of the world-famous Ballymaloe Cookery School.

Darina gave me a job at the school in 2005, where I learned everything from making compost to cooking a three-course meal, from milking cows to harvesting seaweed. I then started running a cupcake business at the local farmers’ market with Darina. We have a saying in Germany: ‘craft has a golden foundation’. My master butcher qualification and everything I had learned and done at the cookery school stood me in good stead, but I still didn’t really know what I wanted to do. So in 2007 I took a break from the school and spent a few months working in one of the most iconic restaurants in America, Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California.

Right across the street from Chez Panisse is a place called the Cheese Board Collective. It’s a worker-owned co-operative where you can buy delicious cheese from all over the world as well as homemade bread, pastries and pizza. I passed the shop several times every day and whenever I walked by, I’d see dozens of people queuing up to buy pizza. What was going on? Curiosity got the better of me and I had to see for myself.

There is only one type of pizza every day and it’s always vegetarian. There’s a wine of the day and a salad and payment is by cash or cheque. That’s it. Simple. After that first visit to the Cheese Board, I was buzzing with ideas. I immediately realized that this was how I could do something new at the cookery school. It would be a win-win for everyone. But how could I create something like that myself? And then I had my eureka moment: there is a wood-burning oven in the Garden Café at the Ballymaloe Cookery School with a kitchen and a big dining room, but it wasn’t being used at the weekends. It would literally take a single spark to create a pizzeria.

As soon as I got back to Ireland, I ran the idea by Darina. She was completely supportive of my vision and said I should go for it. The cookery school only operated from Monday to Friday, so Saturday Pizzas was born.

We fired up the oven and served our first pizza in May 2008. It was a hit from the start. A steady stream of people would come every week, sometimes with queues out the door. It began as a pop-up that closed for the winter, but it quickly became a year-round institution.

Before Saturday Pizzas started, access to the cookery school was limited as the only way you could visit was to take a course or sit in on a demo. One of the great things about Saturday Pizzas is that it has opened the door for people to visit the school, stroll around the gardens and farm shop and have an inexpensive dinner too.

The wood-burning oven at Ballymaloe

My first encounter with a wood-burning oven was in Italy in the 1980s and later at Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, where the most irresistible food was emerging from it. I had loved the flavour of the food since tasting Wolfgang Puck’s bubbly thin crust pizza in Los Angeles a few years previously and so when we opened the Garden Café at the school in the summer of 1998, I decided I wanted a wood-fired oven of my own. So I went to California on a research trip.

My journey took me to Mendocino County where, behind the community centre in a small town called Elk, we found a clay adobe oven large enough to roast a pig. I soon discovered that the man behind many of the great ovens that I saw was an oven-builder from New Zealand, called Alan Scott, who had since returned home to his native country. When I arrived at Chez Panisse, Alice told me all about the vagaries of their wood-burning oven as there had been some teething problems, and suggested I forget about trying to have one built, romantic as that was; better to go to the Italians, who have been making wood-burning ovens for centuries, and buy a kit. She found me the name of a brilliantly efficient Italian company and, much to my amazement, I had the oven within six weeks. The company gave brilliant instructions for installation, in English, and I also took my builder over to see the River Café’s oven in Hammersmith to observe it in operation. Ruth Rogers and the late Rose Gray said it was instrumental in their cooking and they used it every day – so it was a good place to go to see how this type of oven could work.

In 1998 we found a young chef, Stevie O’Brien Gleeson, who had been working with a wood oven in Tosca, a pizzeria in Suffolk Street in Dublin. Stevie spent the summer season with us in the Garden Café and taught us how to work with fire. People came from far and wide for the pizza – the café was open seven days a week and the students loved it too. That year, Stevie concentrated on pizza, but the following year my son, Isaac, became more adventurous – he made a delicious roast tomato soup and we also used the oven to roast fish, meat and vegetables.

In May 2008, 10 years after its installation, our son-in-law, Philip Dennhardt, decided to do a ‘pop-up’ pizzeria from 12.30–4pm every Saturday in the Garden Café (the school is usually closed on a Saturday so the dining room is open to the public). It has proved so popular that Saturday Pizzas are now an institution – there’s cool music and a fun atmosphere plus the 12-week students get the opportunity to learn how it all works, on a rota basis, and to cook with fire – the half-day pizza, calzone, panzerotti, piadina and sfinciuni demonstration is an integral part of the course.

Wood-burning ovens are now quite widespread – popular in many restaurants and not just pizzerias. You’ll often see mobile ones at farmers’ markets and festivals and many people build small versions in their gardens. Philip Dennhardt gives a pizza workshop using the wood-burning oven at the Ballymaloe Cookery School several times a year and Simon Mould, who now runs the ‘Volcano Pizza’ stand at the Midleton Farmers’ Market, is an old student of his. The regulators, who were wary of this trend at the outset, have become more accepting of it and realize that cooking in wood-burning ovens is a time-honoured tradition, which adds immeasurably to the flavour of food.

From30 Years at Ballymaloeby Darina Allen

A typical day at Saturday Pizzas

I try to keep things as simple as possible at the pizzeria. First, every Friday morning, we make the pizza dough so that it can ferment for about 36 hours, which produces a beautiful pizza crust. We have a stroll through the cookery school’s organic gardens and glasshouses to see what ingredients are ready to be harvested. We use fresh, local and organic ingredients as much as possible, which means our pizza toppings reflect the seasons too. You’ll see wild garlic or nettles being used on our pizzas in the spring, courgettes/zucchini and homegrown sweetcorn in the summer as well as fresh tomatoes, peppers and aubergines/eggplant from the glasshouses, then pumpkin and Tuscan kale in the autumn and roasted root vegetables in the winter. Sometimes we even use foraged ingredients, such as sea kale or chanterelle mushrooms. Once we’ve seen what we have in the gardens, we also check what needs to be used up from the cookery school, which could be extra salad leaves or half a wheel of cheese or even a few lobsters. Needless to say, it’s an incredible luxury to be able to play around and cook with these kinds of ingredients.

All the staff arrive at 11am. I have a great team and I couldn’t run the pizzeria without them, so the first thing I do is thank everyone for coming. I like to think of this as creating a cycle of gratitude – I thank my staff from the heart, which is then reflected in how they treat our customers, because I’m also grateful for each and every person who walks through our door. I end every week’s staff meeting by reminding them to treat everyone like a VIP.

We light the wood-burning oven on Saturday morning and make sure there is enough wood for a day’s baking (we need two or three wheelbarrows full of wood to see us through the afternoon), then we organize the kitchen and get all the ingredients for the pizzas ready. Because we operate on such a small scale we prep a lot of ingredients by hand, be it grating Parmesan on a big box grater or painstakingly peeling garlic cloves.

The Margherita and pepperoni pizzas are our flagships, so we can practically do the prep for those blindfolded. More thought and effort go into the special pizzas, which change every week. In addition to the two pizzas that are always on our menu, we also do two specials: one meat special and one vegetarian option. Preparing for the specials takes anywhere from a few minutes to up to 12 hours for toppings like slow-roasted pork.

We open from 12:30 to 4:00, and during that time we typically make 150 pizzas. We also serve a salad, garlic bread, wine, coffee and apple juice. It might look frantic and disorganized when you walk in the door, but it works really well. Everything is self-service, so people are constantly milling around the room and kids are free to wander too. Someone might even play a little tune on the upright piano in the cookery school foyer. It all makes for a very casual, fun, family-friendly atmosphere.

We use the same playing card system I saw in the Cheese Board. When you order a pizza we give you a playing card, which we call out when your pizza is ready to be picked up. The happy hum in the room is constantly punctuated by the dinging bell and one of the staff calling out the cards: ‘Queen of diamonds ready for pick-up! Five of clubs ready for pick-up!’ This system has two major benefits: it means we don’t need staff for table service and it’s a bit of fun that makes people feel like a winner.

Saturday Pizzas at Home

Like any food business, we don’t like to waste food. All our food scraps go to the cookery school’s hens – believe it or not, they go mad for the leftover pizza crusts – and whatever they don’t eat will eventually make its way to the compost bucket.

Saturday Pizzas at Home practically happened by accident. When we had some leftover pizzas one week, I wrapped them up in clingfilm/plastic wrap and stashed them in the freezer. And like most things that I stash in the freezer, I promptly forgot about them. Fast forward a few months and I wondered what had happened to those pizzas. I dug them out of the freezer and cooked them up, and they were fantastic.

After that, we made some extra pizzas one week, wrapped them up and sold them in the farm shop at the cookery school. They sold well there, so I asked a local petrol/gas station if they would be interested in selling them. They sold so many that they asked for more, and then more again. I could see that I was on to something with this idea, so I reached out to a few more local shops and Saturday Pizzas at Home took off from there.

Soon we had so many shop orders and so many people coming through the door on Saturdays that we couldn’t keep up, but I wasn’t sure what direction to take this new aspect of the business in. I still felt like I was just the butcher’s boy; I didn’t know anything about business. Some people told me I should outsource the production of the pizzas and create a brand, but that would have meant losing control over the product and the quality and I didn’t want that. Other people I talked to warned me away from that outsourcing idea, saying my product would just die a slow and lonely death on the shelf.

Around this time I went to New York to visit a friend and I did a butchery demo and a radio interview while I was there too. As I looked around the studio at Heritage Radio, I realized that we were in a shipping container (which also just so happens to be in the famous Roberta’s Pizza restaurant). It was another eureka moment: I could set up a converted shipping container in the cookery school grounds and use it as a little pizza-making factory. So that’s exactly what I did. When I got back from New York I asked our local builder where I could get a shipping container, and unbelievably, it turned out that his brother sells them. Within eight months we went from supplying half a dozen local shops to 19, including some of the bigger supermarkets, and we are continuing to grow.

Over the years we often had people ask if we would do home delivery or if they could pick up pizzas after closing time, so Saturday Pizzas at Home has become the ideal way for our customers to enjoy the same wood-fired Margherita and pepperoni pizzas that we serve at the weekly pop-up. It also means that Saturday Pizzas isn’t just a Saturday job for me anymore – it has become a full-time business.

How to make a business out of pizza

1 Offer what people want to buy, not just what you like and want to sell. For example, if you think that Hawaiian pizza is the best pizza in the world, don’t be surprised that not everybody thinks so too. In other words, if you’re the only person that likes your product, then nobody is going to buy it.

2 Believe in the integrity of your business. People can tell when you’re passionate about your product.

3 Work hard, but also work smart. Get a calculator and crunch the numbers, because the success of your business will be measured in them.

4 You need to have a system. If you’re the best in your area of the business but only you can do it, how can you ever have time off and let somebody else take over for a little while? Systems make work easy.

5 Don’t pursue perfection. Everybody makes mistakes, especially when setting up a new business, but the important thing is to learn from them. Try your best and give it all you’ve got, then next time, give a little more.

How to make great pizza

After nearly 10 years of making pizza, I wanted to share some of our favourite recipes as well as all the things I’ve learned along the way. But this book is also based on my mistakes. I’ve probably made every mistake possible – forgetting to put salt in the dough, using the wrong flour, putting too many toppings on the pizza, loading up the oven with damp wood – but I always learned from them and it has made me a better pizza maker in the end. This book will tell you how to do it right and also what to do when things go wrong.

The recipes in this book are a reflection of the local, seasonal ingredients available to us in East Cork and aren’t set in stone. We use wild garlic when it’s in season and rocket/arugula the rest of the year, we use thyme one week but marjoram the next, or we put rosé veal sausage on the menu when a calf from the farm’s herd has been butchered. Use the recipes as a springboard for creating your own combinations of toppings, based on whatever you happen to have on hand yourself. The variations listed in many of the recipes will give you an idea of the endless different directions you can take your toppings in. For example, we often make a simple pizza of roast chicken, thyme and aioli, but towards the end of the summer we’ll make a version with spring onions/scallions, homegrown sweetcorn and coriander/cilantro, whereas in the autumn we might use creamy spinach and rosemary instead.

When it comes to toppings, there are no rules. The main thing to keep in mind is balance. You don’t want a pizza that’s too cheesy or too saucy, nor do you want one that only has a few stingy slices of pepperoni or only a few olives. Try to get an even spread of toppings so that every slice has a little of everything.

But this book isn’t just about the recipes. If you follow the principles, tips and techniques in this book, you will make great pizzas. But when you make them over and over again, you will master them. One of the things that cooking has taught me is that if you use these same principles of mastery through repetition in other areas of your life, you can achieve any goal you set for yourself.

GETTING STARTED

Equipment

You don’t need any fancy or expensive equipment to make great pizza at home. There are plenty of gadgets and specialist equipment available on the market, such as high-end pizza stones made from ultra-conductive steel, but I bet you already have most, if not all, of what you need to get started.

Before you invest in any new kitchen equipment or gadgets, ask yourself if you’re really going to get good use and value out of it or if it will quickly find its way to the back of the cupboard, never to see the light of day again. If you’re willing to have it visible on your work surface or if you know you’ll use it at least once a week, then it’s a good buy.

Dough cutter and bowl scraper

A dough cutter is a vital piece of equipment. If you get nothing else, get one of these. In fact, I suggest you get two: a metal one for cutting the dough into portions and a plastic bowl scraper, which is a little more flexible and won’t scratch surfaces. You can buy either one fairly cheaply at any good kitchen supply store or online, but if you make a lot of pizza or bread, it might just be the best investment you make in your kitchen this year.

Rolling pin

Even when you become a pro at stretching dough by hand there will inevitably be a few times when you’ll have to roll it out instead because the dough is too delicate or too stiff to stretch it, so a sturdy rolling pin is a must.

Pizza stone, pizza pan or baking tray

The advantage of a pizza stone is that it retains heat well and conducts it evenly, resulting in a crispier base, but it’s not essential. You can still get good results using a metal pizza pan that you can find in any kitchen supply store. But failing that, you can also bake a pizza on a baking tray that you’ve turned upside down and preheated in the oven.

Pizza peel

A pizza peel or paddle is like a small flat shovel that’s used for transferring pizzas in and out of the oven. Peels designed for home use have short handles, but peels to be used with wood-fired ovens have a very long handle so that you can slide the pizza close to the fire. If you don’t have a pizza peel, then a thin wooden chopping board works well too. We sell a stainless steel pizza peel made by KitchenCraft in the shop at the cookery school. One advantage of a metal peel is that the pizza slides off it more easily than a wooden one, but a wooden peel can do double duty as a chopping board when your pizza comes out of the oven.

Pizza cutter

Proving the point that you don’t need fancy equipment, we use a pizza cutter that I picked up in Ikea. The other type of cutter is a large double-handled pizza knife that looks like a giant mezzaluna and will cut a pizza all the way across in one clean slice.

Ladle

Did you know there are specific ladles for pizza? They have a flat base so that you can use the bottom to spread the sauce evenly over the dough, but a regular ladle or even a big metal spoon works fine for this too.

Pastry brush

You’ll need a pastry brush for brushing the rim of the dough with olive oil. Just make sure that the hairs of the brush don’t come off and stick to the dough. You might prefer to get a silicone brush for this reason.

Flour shaker

A flour shaker gives you a nice, light, even dusting of flour on your peel or chopping board and dough. This is especially important when you’re working with wet, sticky dough.

Dough container

You’ll need something to put your dough on or in while it rests and it needs to be something that can be kept covered at all times. Separate side plates for each ball of dough work really well and are easy to cover in clingfilm/plastic wrap and stash in your fridge, but a baking tray works too, as does a large airtight container with a lid. If using a baking tray, leave a good bit of space between the dough balls because they will spread out as they rest and if they merge together it will be hard to keep them in a nice round shape. If using an airtight container, you might be better off using separate ones for each ball of dough and use one that’s big enough to let you manoeuvre in it to easily scoop out the dough ball while still maintaining its shape.

Digital kitchen scales

You’ll get better and more consistent results if you weigh your ingredients, including water, rather than using measuring cups. Once you make the switch to digital kitchen scales, you’ll never look back. All the recipes in this book work best if you weigh your ingredients.

Mortar and pestle

A good-quality stone mortar and pestle is a beautiful piece of kitchen equipment and will last a lifetime. I use it for crushing garlic into a paste, crushing herbs and grinding spices. You can even make mayonnaise in one. I did a cooking course in Thailand and the Thai chef said that an important part of using a mortar and pestle is to make lots of noise – he meant that to really work things into a paste, you can’t be afraid of it!

Japanese mandoline

These are brilliant for slicing foods thinly, but use it carefully and always use the safety guard. The blade is razor sharp and it’s all too easy to cut yourself.

Squeezy bottle

If you want to drizzle lines of mayonnaise on your pizzas – and believe me, once you try it, you’ll be hooked – then a plastic squeezy bottle is a handy thing to have.

Ingredients

Strong white flour

Strong white flour has lots of gluten in it, which is what makes dough elastic. The high gluten content in strong white flour is perfect for pizza dough, pasta and bread, but not for more delicate things like cakes or pastry. At the pizzeria we use Doves Farm Organic Strong White Bio-bake Bread Flour, but you can use any flour labelled as strong or very strong, bread flour or ‘00’ flour. ‘00’ flour (which stands for doppio zero, or double zero) is an Italian flour used in pasta and pizza dough. The numbers are an indication of how finely the flour is ground – Italians use a scale from 00 to 2 and ‘00’ flour is almost like powder – and how much of the bran and germ have been removed. Every type or brand of flour will absorb a different amount of water, so every time you make dough it will be different, even if you’re using the same recipe and doing everything the same way each time. Plus the more protein there is in the flour, the more water it will absorb. You need to use your judgment as to whether or not a particular batch of dough needs a little more flour or another splash of water. The more pizza dough you make, the better you will become at judging this.

Water

Salt

There are many different types of salt, such as sea salt (which can be flaky, fine or coarse), kosher salt, pink Himalayan salt and dairy salt. It’s important to use the type of salt called for in a recipe, otherwise the ratio of salt to the other ingredients will be off. For example, 1 teaspoon of fine sea salt can have almost double the amount of salt as 1 teaspoon of flaky sea salt. Salt is added to pizza dough for flavour but also because it plays an important part in the structure and texture of dough. It makes the gluten more stretchy and thus it makes the dough stronger and more elastic, so use the amount and type called for in the recipe to get the best results.

Yeast

A living organism, yeast produces carbon dioxide, which is what makes dough light and airy. If you just mix together flour, water and salt without any yeast, it will be heavy and hard to digest. There are three types of yeast: fresh yeast, which you can buy in some specialist stores or baker supply stores; fast action dried yeast, which is widely available; and wild yeast, which is in the air all around us. You have to capture wild yeast with a mixture of flour and water – this is how you make a sourdough starter, like the one in our sourdough pizza recipe on page 28. We use fast action dried yeast in all our other doughs because it’s easy to source and store.

Cheese

Mozzarella is the classic pizza cheese. It has a neutral flavour, which makes it an ideal base for other toppings. But all mozzarella is not created equal. Fresh, whole mozzarella or ready-grated mozzarella are the most widely available. Fresh can be made from water buffalo milk (mozzarella di bufala) or cow’s milk (fior di latte) and it has more moisture than the grated mozzarella you can buy in bags at the grocery store, so it melts differently on a pizza. You can use many types of cheese on a pizza – just look at the classic quattro formaggi (four cheese) pizza for an example of that – but mozzarella is used as a basic topping for almost all the pizza recipes in this book. As with any other ingredient, use the best-quality mozzarella you can find to make the best pizzas.

Tomatoes

Whether you use fresh or canned tomatoes, the most important thing is that they are ripe and good quality. I recommend using good-quality cans of whole plum tomatoes, the gold standard being San Marzano tomatoes imported from Italy, if you can get them. The best tomatoes only need to be blended with some salt and pepper and maybe a pinch of sugar to balance out their acidity to make a delicious sauce, which is how Neapolitan pizzerias typically do it.

Olive oil