Margherita Pizza

Variations

• Marinara: No cheese — just tomato, garlic, and oregano. The simplest Neapolitan pie.
• Bufala: Buffalo-milk mozzarella for a creamier top.
• Pan pizza: Pressed into an oiled tray and baked thick and crisp.
• Cold-fermented: Rest the dough in the fridge 24-72 hours for deeper flavor.

Tips

• One dough becomes two different breads, and your hands decide which part is which. Focaccia sorts the family out: "same family of dough, different hydration. Pizza dough is around 60% and stretches thin; focaccia is 80%, will not stretch, and makes big holes instead." This dough is at 65%. Stretching means you get to choose how thin it goes — and a pizza chooses differently in two places on one disc. Sangak works the same lever the other way: "no rolling pin. It presses out the bubbles the ferment built, and with them the open crumb" — and then dimples the top with the fingers so the steam has a route out and the bread stays deliberately flat. Chapati balloons whole because both faces seal instead. A pizza wants both answers at once: the centre pressed to 3mm and then pinned down by the wet weight of sauce and cheese, and an untouched band of 1-2cm at the edge keeping its gas. So "hands, not a rolling pin" is not really an instruction about preserving bubbles; it is an instruction about where to put your hands.
• The stone is the only part of the oven that is actually hot enough. What your oven is doing states it first: "when the oven beeps, the only thing that is hot is the air. The walls, the floor, and any tray or stone inside are still cold" — and it names pizza as something that shows it. Sangak preheats its stones forty-five minutes and says why: "stones are less dense and have far more surface than a steel tray, so they take much longer to charge. Dough laid on under-heated stones comes out dented and pale." Heat control is the other half: a vessel preheated inside the oven does not bake the underside, it fries it. A domestic oven at 250-280°C is running well below a wood-fired one, and that temperature cannot be bought. So the recipe buys stored heat in a mass instead and spends all of it on the base in the first seconds. Naan and tandoori chicken make the same substitution from above, putting the oven's top element where the tandoor's radiant heat was.
• "Go light on sauce and cheese" is a question about the clock, not about taste. Mozzarella has already written the line: "a wet ball weeps in the oven and soaks the base. For margherita pizza, slice it and drain it in a sieve for 30 minutes first." Soaking is not the whole of it. As browning has it, while there is water on a surface the temperature is pinned at 100°C, so too much of it does more than dampen the dough — the base never sets at all. A 3mm base has no crumb to take that water into, and the time available is seven to ten minutes: the water coming down from the topping and the heat coming up out of the stone have to finish their race inside it.
• Get the oven as hot as possible. Preheat a pizza stone (or an upturned tray) at least 30 minutes for a crisp base.
• Stretch by hand, not a rolling pin, to keep the air in the rim so it puffs.
• Go light on sauce and cheese — too much moisture makes the dough soggy. Drain fresh mozzarella first.
• Add basil after baking so it doesn't scorch.
• '00' flour is traditional, but bread flour works beautifully.