How to Make Neapolitan Pizza at Home

But the real magic comes from the fierce heat of the wood-burning pizza oven used to bake it: These brick domes bake so hot and fast that a pie can emerge puffy, blistered, and tender in under 2 minutes. In the far tamer heat of a conventional oven, by the time any requisite charring appears, the crust is usually dry and tough.

To successfully pull off this style of pie at home, we needed to devise a special formula for the dough and rethink how to use a conventional oven. 

There are countless styles of pizza around the world, but the ubiquitious round, thin dough topped with cheese and tomatoes was created in Naples around the late 18th century to early 19th century. Over time, pizzas baked in the city came to embody very specific characteristics that set this style apart from others that evolved elsewhere.

First, a Neapolitan pie is never wider than a foot. It features a puffy edge known as the cornicione whose crumb is moist, airy, and somewhat translucent.

The rim and the underside of the crust are spottily charred with dark spots called “leoparding,” which bring tinges of bitterness that balance the creamy cheese and bright sauce on top. These toppings are always applied judiciously to allow the crust to stand out.

The freshly baked pie is soft and borderline juicy at the center, so diners go at it with a knife and fork until the center cools and firms up enough to be eaten out of hand.

Neapolitan pizza begins with a lean dough–just flour (traditionally the Italian kind designed specifically for pizza, called tipo 00 pizza flour), water, yeast, and salt. Typically, the hydration level of the dough (the ratio of water to flour, which is expressed as a percentage) runs just north of 60 percent. It’s wet, but not soupy, and in a blazing pizza oven bakes up nicely tender. It is kneaded by hand and left to ferment for about a day, then shaped, topped, and placed in the oven where, within seconds, it billows steam as the sauce and cheese boil and the wide rim inflates like a bicycle tire.

Usually Neapolitan-style pizzas baked in a regular oven lack the texture and flavor of the real deal. That’s because a home oven typically tops out at 500 degrees and not only takes longer to bake pizza (and parches the crust in the process), it can’t deliver the “fire flavor” that is critical for Neapolitan style.

A professional pizza oven, meanwhile, gets much hotter (some hit 900 degrees) and blasts the pie with enough heat so the crust tans deeply and chars spottily (that prized feature called leoparding) but stays tender within.

Most Neapolitan pizza recipes geared for home ovens raise the hydration to about 70 percent because the pizza needs to bake for much longer. But while the extra water can boost tenderness in the baked pie, it also makes the dough very slack and hard to shape.

Our workaround: We introduced a tangzhong. This Chinese term describes a cooked paste of flour and water that gets mixed with the rest of the ingredients, producing a dough loaded with moisture that’s as easy to shape as a drier one. 

To make the tangzhong, I zapped the paste mixture in the microwave until it looked like stiff pudding and then mixed in the rest of the water and flour, yeast, salt, and a little sugar (atypical, but helpful for browning) by hand. After a brief rest, the dough smoothed into a pillowy, extensible mass. In fact, it was so easy to handle that I added even more water, pushing the hydration close to 80 percent while keeping it workable.

One common way to cook the underside of pizza more rapidly in a conventional oven is to bake it on a preheated steel or stone. But this still leaves the top rather pale—even if you also raise the oven rack to capture heat radiating off the ceiling. There’s simply not enough of it. 

Some recipes use the broiler in tandem with the bake setting, preheating the stone at the highest possible bake temperature and either flipping on the broiler just before baking to superheat the stone and then shutting it off, or turning it on during the final moments of baking to blast the top surface—or doing both. 

Our innovation: We broiled the pizza from start to finish. A broiler’s radiant heat cooks food faster than the hot air of an oven’s bake setting. Flipping the broiler on to cook each pizza blasted heat onto the top of the pie, so it puffed and browned rapidly. (Since the radiant heat diffuses with distance, we also made sure to place the oven rack just 9 inches from the broiler element.) Meanwhile,the preheated steel/stone poured heat into the underside so it also cooked quickly. 

Our pies were stunners: airy, lightly crisp, and well tanned with spotty char, and properly soft in the middle.