Neapolitan pizza is the most famous pizza on Earth, and it is also the simplest: a soft, wet-centred disc with a blistered, smoky rim, made from four ingredients and baked in about ninety seconds of very fierce heat. You cannot build a 450 °C wood oven in your kitchen — but with cold-fermented dough and a screaming-hot pizza steel, you can get remarkably close.
What is Neapolitan pizza?
Born in Naples and protected by its own craft association, true pizza napoletana means: soft dough made only of flour, water, salt and yeast; hand-stretched (never rolled); topped sparingly; and baked fast at extreme heat so the rim puffs, blisters and leopard-spots while the centre stays moist. If your home pizza is cracker-crisp all over, that’s Chicago’s cousin or a Roman style — delicious, but not this.
Ingredients
Makes 2 pizzas (4 servings) · prep 30 min · rise 24 h · bake 4–6 min each
- 500 g Italian ‘00’ flour
- 325 ml cool water
- 10 g fine sea salt
- 2 g instant dried yeast
- 200 g San Marzano tomatoes, crushed by hand
- 150 g fresh mozzarella (fior di latte), torn and well drained
- Fresh basil leaves
- Extra-virgin olive oil, for drizzling
How to make Neapolitan pizza, step by step
- Mix. Dissolve the yeast in the water, add the flour, and mix to a shaggy dough. Rest 20 minutes.
- Knead. Add the salt and knead gently for 5–10 minutes, until smooth and springy.
- Bulk rise. Ferment at room temperature for 2 hours, then divide into two 400 g balls.
- Cold ferment. Refrigerate the balls for 24 hours — this is where the flavour and the big bubbles come from.
- Heat everything. Take the dough out 2 hours before baking. Oven as hot as it goes, pizza steel or stone on the top shelf, preheated 45 minutes minimum.
- Stretch. Press the dough out from the centre with fingertips, leaving a 2 cm puffy rim. Never use a rolling pin.
- Top sparingly. A thin layer of tomato, dotted mozzarella, basil, a drizzle of oil. Wet toppings are the enemy of the crisp-undercorn.
- Bake fast. Slide onto the steel, 4–6 minutes, rotating once, until blistered and spotted.
- Eat immediately. Neapolitan pizza waits for no one.
“The dough does the work; your only job is to not get in its way — no rolling pin, no overload, no patience at the oven door.”
Home-oven tricks that actually matter
- A pizza steel beats a stone — it stores more heat and blasts the base.
- Broil trick: switch to the top broiler for the last minute to spot the rim.
- Drain the mozzarella on kitchen paper for 30 minutes, or the centre floods.
- Less is more: six basil leaves and restraint will beat a loaded base every time.
Craving something with more fire? Our tacos al pastor recipe and chicken biryani recipe run the same step-by-step treatment — the world’s famous foods, cooked properly at home.
