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I am from Naples and eat regularly at Gino Sorbillo's and Ciro Salvo's places. As it often happens here, everyone will swear by its pretty small and obscure "favorite place", but they are masters without doubt ;)
The dough recipe from the article is pretty legit and exactly the way I do it at home; the main problem I see is that it would be pretty hard to find good Mozzarella or Fiordilatte cheese (Fiordilatte di Agerola is slightly drier than Mozzarella, therefore producing less liquid in the oven, and also costs less), and I find that pizza done according to the Neapolitan recipe loses much when using a different kind of cheese.
A pet peeve of mine is that many recipes, while getting most of it right, use instant yeast; an important part of Neapolitan pizza is the slow dough rise using very little amounts of yeast, that should take from a minimum of 7/8 hours to an entire day or more (of course by storing it in a fridge).
A good place to source the cheeses in the US is Caputo Brothers in Pennsylvania. They are one of the few places in the US doing cultured mozzarella and also have a lower moisture version for pizza.
I use packed dry yeast but I have always let my dough do a slow rise in the refrigerator for a minimum of 3 days up to 6 days. I use 00 flour and cook the pizza's using my Roccbox pizza oven or a custom Baking Steel 23x19 3/8" steel in the oven.
Also if you want a good guide for NY style pizza then this is a good read.
Another thing to note is that since a lot of Neapolitan pizza makers conduct the entire fermentation at room temp, salt percentages are important and can change throughout the year with ambient temps.
Sorbillo's is the best I've tried. I remember walking in front of the shop a few times and thinking it's some kind of tourist trap (it's on the possibly most touristy street in the city), but decided to try it out in the end. Absolutely fantastic. The pie was great, but TBH I think there were other places in town whose pies were as good, but the quality of the toppings... just wow. And I was surprised that the price was the same as any other place in town (I think a marinara was something like 3-4 Euros).
My second favorite is in Switzerland of all places, in the small town of Meilen. Amazing toppings too. But I went there once since the start of the lockdowns, and it didn't taste as good. I don't know if it's the pandemic leaving a bitter taste, or just an issue for their supply chains...
Ciao, Come siete ?
I'm not sure if you have ever been to NYC but an interesting observation I have had with Gino Sorbillo is the pizza in Napoli is very good, but he/they opened a restaurant in NYC and it's absolutely average at best.
I assume they import everything, but quality wise, the places are polar opposites.
Also curious your thoughts of Da Michele?
Why would instant yeast have an effect on slow rising? You'd just use a smaller amount than AD or cake yeast? I can't think of any significant difference especially compared to AD.
Those ratios looked off to me so I tried it out today.
Now, the amount of moisture a flour will absorb depends on many things, including its age, source and your climate. I'm in an arid region of Canada, and our flours are typically harder than most. Having said that, I'm lucky enough to have access to relatively fresh, locally milled flour.
So as I said, this moisture ratio looked off to me compared to what I usually bake with.
At 300 ml of water, I didn't even get a dough that would combine. I added about a tablespoon and a half of extra water, and still got a much firmer dough than I would usually want. After resting for 20 minutes, folding it left creases as it wouldn't stick to itself.
I've got it rising now, so we'll see if it still turns out, but if you're trying this with typical American store-bought 0 or 1 flour, I would recommend starting with 5-10% more water and adding flour if necessary once it's combined.
> an important part of Neapolitan pizza is the slow dough rise using very little amounts of yeast, that should take from a minimum of 7/8 hours to an entire day or more (of course by storing it in a fridge).
This is gospel for pizza. My wife used to run a NYC-style pizza place in college, and later a chain pizza place, and they both had 24-72 hour slow proofs in the fridge. In other words, they mixed the dough and let it rise, very slowly, in the fridge for 2-3 days before using it. Kenji Lopez-Alt has similar advice in his pizza articles.
Isn't the oven one of the keys? And how true is that 'leopard spots' on the cornicione is a sign of a well made pizza?
Are they ever made using sourdough (wild yeast)? I imagine that would be more "traditional"?
Mozzarella is surprisingly easy to make at home in less than an hour.
How do you feel about Neapolitan vs Montanara?
Neopolitan is a setup for failure in the home kitchen. It's one of the most demanding styles in terms of equipment and preparation. It makes zero sense to pursue it at home unless you actually have a very strong preference for this style (highly unlikely if commercial pizza is even a crude reflection of preferences).
It's fetishism. It's sought because it has cultural cachet, it's hard to obtain, it's 'authentic', etc.
> setup for failure ... most demanding ... makes zero sense ... It's fetishism. It's sought because it has cultural cachet, it's hard to obtain, it's 'authentic', etc.
Totally agree. There's beauty in such crazy pursuits, don't you think?
I shared the link in the spirit of HN, knowing this place is full of people who enjoy chasing obsessions that are risky, or just because, or because someone said it was impossible.
Long live kitchen hackers with zero sense! It's always enriching and occasionally successful. :-)
My favorite read on pizza:
http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm
Nothing beats Neapolitan-style pizza. If you are ever in Chicago, skip the deep dish and instead head over to Spacca Napoli on the city's northside.
https://www.spaccanapolipizzeria.com/
Supposedly, the owner shipped in Italian raw materials for the clay oven, as well as Italian masons to build it. I don't know that the oven is the reason for why their product is so good, but it is just miles apart from any other type of pizza in Chicago.
They also have wines that can't be found anywhere else in the US.
Norther Italian here: the recipe for the dough is reasonable. I usually go for 500g flour (typically a mix of 0 and 00 which I find at my grocery store) and 300ml water.
If you want a much quicker fermentation, You can use between 15g and 25g of yeast. Put a couple teaspoons of sugar to let the yeast work better, and make sure the water is between 20°C and 45°C.
But the most interesting idea for home baking is the "double fermentation": let the dough rest for about one hour in a slightly warm environment (20°C - 40°C - usually that means starting the oven for one minute, then turning it off and putting the covered dough in). Then prepare the base for the pizza on your baking tin, but DO NOT PUT anything on it; instead, leave it for 30-45 min more resting in the oven. Then, extract it, put the tomato and other things, and cook it.
Our last attempt:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B_TDukylKSj/
We made it in a regular home oven but on maximum temperature of 285°C (545°F) and broiler on. It takes no more than 2-3 minutes.
We followed this recipe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-SJGQ2HLp8
I have found that the key to getting the dough really stretchy is the autolyse part: first mix ~⅔ of the flour/yeast with all of the water to make something like a pancake batter, stir for a few minutes, and let that sit for at least 20 minutes. Then add in the rest of the flour, knead, and let rest overnight.
This isn't mentioned in the linked BBC article, but both http://www.varasanos.com/PizzaRecipe.htm and http://www.perfekte-pizza.de/ swear by it, and I think it has made a noticeable difference to my dough.
I can't speak to pizza, but I have an espresso story to tell.
One of my favorite things about going to Italy is the quality of the coffee. I really like extreme dark roast (your typical American diner coffee doesn't even count as coffee in my book). In Italy you can go into pretty much any coffee shop and come away with a top-quality espresso. (Don't even get me started on Starbucks.) It's a taste I inherited from my parents, who have European roots.
Now, my parents are seriously old-school. They still live in the house I grew up in, a house they bought new in 1975 and pretty much never updated. It still has the original flower-pattern wall paper. Walking into their house today feels like stepping into a time machine that transports you to an episode of the Brady Bunch. And in their kitchen is a 40-year-old Mr. Coffee which my father loves to futz with. On a good day he can coax it into producing an acceptable cup of joe, but that's about it. So for their 50th anniversary I decided I was going to buy them a proper espresso machine.
Now, I know next to nothing about espresso except that I love to drink it, so I started doing some homework and very soon got lost in a morass of coffee geekdom. The range of options available in the espresso machine market is truly mind-boggling, as are the prices. I didn't mind dropping some serious coin (this was their 50th anniversary after all) but I wanted to make sure I was actually getting something for my money. So I decided to do some experiments.
At the time I worked in a co-working office that had a high-end espresso machine (retail price $5000) and several Italians so I asked one of them to show me how to make a proper espresso. I wanted to use the espresso that came out of the office machine as a baseline and compare it to what I could make on a less expensive machine to see if the machine actually made a difference. "The first thing you have to do," he told me, "is to get the right beans. You have to go to this little specialty shop that's a half-hour drive away and get this particular brand of beans..." which, of course, cost $50 a pound or something absurd like that. But I love my parents, so I dutifully complied.
Proper beanage having been procured, we spent several hours brewing espresso with just about every possible variation on the theme you could imagine. Different grinds (we had a high-end burr grinder in the office too), different packings, different machine settings. Not once did we manage to produce a cup that any of us considered even remotely drinkable. It was all acidic and awful, probably because the machine had never been cleaned since it was installed god-only-knows how many years before.
I ended up getting them a Keurig. I got one for myself too. It makes a decent cup of coffee, but nothing compared to what you find in Italy. It is still a mystery to me how the Italians manage to produce such consistently good coffee, but only in Italy. When they come to the U.S. they seem to lose the touch. Maybe there's something in the water.
I'm quarantined with two Italians (father-in-law and his mother) from Northern Italy and had been planning on making pizza from scratch to surprise them but always thought I would make a huge mess in the kitchen... from the video, it looks totally manageable! The hardest part is having to wait 11 hours to eat it!
Previous discussion from last week:
Hear me out this is one of the best how-to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN2HkepzPhU
– an Italian who eats 2 pies per week on average
Like many, I've been learning new recipes recently and that includes pizza -
I've been using this dough recipe (it has wholewheat in it) [0] and been really liking the flavor of the dough. I've also moved to slow rise, the dough flavor seems more complex (or it could be psychosomatic). I leave it in the fridge for 2 days or 3 days, depending on how quickly we go through one batch.
But for cooking, I'm following this method (which is similar to what suggested in the OP). Basically to cook the pizza with tomato sauce first and then add the cheese [1] (PSA - this guy has such fun personality, be prepared to watch hours of his pizza videos)
I've also bought canned peel san marzano tomatoes (from both Whole Foods and TJs) and just used an impression blender to puree it with some basil.
I watched an interview with the owner of Lucali in NY [2] and he said he cooks his tomato sauce. So I've been cooking my tomato puree simmering it for 30-40 min. It makes it much richer. Still not sure if I like it more or not.
[0] https://www.billyparisi.com/homemade-pizza-homemade-pizza-do...
For anyone interested in more information:
I recently discovered Vito Iacopelli's excellent YouTube channel on (predominantly Neapolitan) pizza making. He runs a Neapolitan pizzaria in Los Angeles and covers things like stretching techniques, tests with different ingredients and fermentation processes, and methods specifically designed to be used at home.
I highly recommend the book "American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza". I have a digital version and it took my pizza game to the next level.
>Master bread baker Peter Reinhart follows the origins of pizza from Italy to the States, capturing the stories behind the greatest artisanal pizzas of the Old World and the New.
>Beginning his journey in Genoa, Reinhart scours the countryside in search of the fabled focaccia col formaggio. He next heads to Rome to sample the famed seven-foot-long pizza al taglio, and then to Naples for the archetypal pizza napoletana. Back in America, the hunt resumes in the unlikely locale of Phoenix, Arizona, where Chris Bianco of Pizzeria Bianco has convinced many that his pie sets the new standard in the country. The pizza mecca of New Haven, grilled pizza in Providence, the deep-dish pies of Chicago, California-style pizza in San Francisco and Los Angeles—these are just a few of the tasty attractions on Reinhart's epic tour.
>Returning to the kitchen, Reinhart gives a master class on pizza-making techniques and provides more than 60 recipes for doughs, sauces and toppings, and the pizzas that bring them all together. His insatiable curiosity and gift for storytelling make American Pie essential reading for those who aspire to make great pizza at home, as well as for anyone who enjoys the thrill of the hunt.
I very much enjoy making pizza (or pasta) in the evening after work. It's a great way to relax, watch something on the side and provides some kind of Italian style escapism where you enter semi-consciously a fantasy world of Mediterranean savoir vivre (what's the Italian term here?). In the end I enjoy (usually together with my girlfriend or guests) the result with a nice bottle of red wine which provides the elevating intoxication to round up the experience.
I like to experiment with my pizza and pasta recipes and place focus on trying to keep it simple. I believe that art benefits of some structure. Think rhyming patterns in poems or tonality in music. I'm aware of atonal music or not rhyming poetry but that's my point - it's a very different experience - more difficult. That's why I also like to not go and buy the best most expensive ingredients but instead attempt to restrict them to what I get from ALDI. Sometimes I'm just going crazy in some bio market and just buy the top notch stuff. But it seems that the taste is not that much depending on whether the tomatoes are from San Marzano or your run-of-the-mill variety from a regular super market.
My latest - not yet used - pizza gadget is an oven stone. Can't wait to find out how it will affect the outcome.
I typically buy my dough from Trader Joe's but what to start doing it myself. There's a recipe in the article, but anyone else have a goto recipe they love?
The first episode of Ugly Delicious on Netflix was about Pizza, including Neapolitan pizza.
Chef Chang ordered Domino's pizza to one of the restaurants. Hilarious.
I prefer thicker dough for my pizza.
Those ultra-thin doughs just feel like a cheat.
550 flour, half cube yeast, a tiny spoon salt and sugar, 150ml milk filled up by water to ~275ml fluid. 5 spoons oil. Knead the dough and add the fluid. When it's nice textured leave it for the rest of the day or at least a few hours.
You get a dough you can load full with whatever you want and you'll have enough food for a few days.
Personally, I like my Pizazz Pizza plate/oven thing. I make dough out of like 5 ingredients and let it rise for a few hours in the fridge. Top with whatever and eat--pizza is about enjoyment to me, not this Anthony Bourdain never ending quest for the perfect slice of sushi, its about making it, enjoying it, eating it.
This is the best video on making neapolitan style at home with an cast iron pan and oven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXAW2GseICs
I've used this method a few times to superb results.
For a practical, home-bakable, sourdough recipe I can vouch for:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HXAW2GseICs
Top comment: "There is more drama in this video than in the entire Transformers franchise."
Great read, thanks for sharing, there was just a new oven announced, I think it's ooni, which is for this kind of pizza. It's an outdoor propane pizza oven. BTW, I'm not sure you can cook pizza at 500 degrees in 90 seconds like the article says.
The article fails to mention Roman "pinsa", which was commonplace a _bit_ earlier than 1700 and is what gave pizza its name.
Get the G3 Ferrari electric pizza oven. you can cook a pizza in 2-3 minutes in that. There is even (of course!) an online community of pizza oven hackers who install additional electric heating elements in the oven to get the temperature even higher :)
Disclaimer: I grew up in Italy and frequently travel there.
Best pizza I ever had was in Vienna, yes, made by an Italian but not the classical Napolitan pizza. I strongly prefer Rome as reference for it.
I'm surprised they use yeast and not sourdough as that would add more flavor. Sourdough is surprisingly easy to make and maintain btw. During these wfh days especially: Just mix 50grams of flour with 50 grams of water and leave in an open container for a couple of days, when you see bubbles, put half of is (50gr) together with 25gr of flour and 25gr of water, repeat. In a bread of 500 grams of meal and 250 ml of water, add 100 gr of your bubbling sourdough, kneed, let rise for 3 hours, and overnight into the fridge, easy peasy.
Btw, that standard kneeding hook of the Kitchen aid is really a pos: Get a better one asap.
Source ingredients that are only available in one location on earth, and cook using a device which is very uncommon in most households. Sure, easy.
A question for italians: do you use raw tomato puree, or do you fry it? I've always used fried tomato puree (fried at home with olive oil)
I always have a hard time getting the dough stretched out really thin. I end up with super floof pizza. What am I doing wrong?
The term “margherita pizza” suggests a different authentic meaning compared to the widespread conception.
My biggest challenge has been making a good sauce. I love making pizza at home with my kids.
Please ignore all these experts, all they want is to make you feel special because you drink/eat their stuff.
Above a certain threshold one cannot tell the difference between good and very good. Wine tasters know it and it has been very well documented.
When it comes to flavours, as long as it doesn't harm you, your judgement is as good as anybody else.
someone mentioned honey instead of sugar, can I have some thoughts on milk instead of water and brown instead of white flour?
The secret to great pizza sauce is more sugar than you’d expect.
Pizza is a dough base with some veg and cheese sprinkled on top of it. Lets not make it more special than it needs to be. It's not very hard to make it and even first time it will taste good enough.Maybe not as good as if some Italian would do it but definitely not bad either.