best pizza recipe — Blog

It’s that time of year again when we’re flush with sun golds. The occasion calls for making one of my favorite summer sauces from slow and low roasted sun gold tomatoes, garlic, basil and a generous bath of olive oil. After cooking for about an hour and a half, each tomato is peeled and pressed through a fine mesh strainer or food mill. The resulting sauce is so incredible on pizza or pasta and the oil that remains in the pan is a revelation- drizzled on some good bread, used in a salad dressing, or on whatever else you can think of. The skins can also be used to make a killer tomato paste/spread - pulverized with a mortar and pestle - and slathered onto some toast. Nothing gets wasted. The sauce is so perfect I wanted to keep this pizza super simple with sun gold sauce, mozzarella, basil, and grated pecorino Romano. Video of the process is below.

Ingredients:

Sun Gold cherry tomatoes (2 – 3 lbs)

Garlic (4 cloves smashed)

Grated pecorino Romano cheese

Extra Virgin Olive oil

Basil

Mozzarella

Sauce Instructions:

The real heart of this pizza is the Sun Gold sauce. It’s so simple but as Frank Prisinzano would say – it’s insane. Set your oven to 275F.
Fill a deep skillet with the tomatoes. Pour in a generous amount of olive oil. The tomatoes don’t need to be submerged, but you want a healthy layer on oil in the bottom of the pan. This oil, by the time you’re done, will be a transcendent addition to grilled veggies, salads, or anything else you can think of.
Add the garlic and a generous amount of basil, toss together.
Roast for about an hour and a half until the tomatoes are fragrant, soft, and the skin is starting to fall off.
Remove from the oven and allow to cool a little before handling.
The next part is the most labor intensive. You will now peel each individual tomato and squeeze out the meat into a bowl.
Reserve the tomato skins which can be dehydrated and made into salt, or pulverized in a mortar and pestle to make a delicious tomato paste/spread.
Use your fingers to mash the tomatoes and transfer to a wire mesh colander or a food mill and press to remove the seeds.
What’s left is an amazing bright orange tomato sauce that works well for pizza and pasta dishes.

The Dough:

For the pizza dough I have been very happy using a Ken Forkish recipe from Flour Water Salt Yeast for an overnight dough with levain. It’s one of the few recipes that I have decided not to mess with as it always yields great results. Recently I’ve been using Caputo Manitoba flour which has been delivering wonderful results.

The Assembly & Finishing:

Stretch your dough working on a lightly floured work surface.
Spoon on the Sun Gold sauce evenly and generously.
Evenly spread out slices or torn chunks of mozzarella on the pizza.
Hit it with a layer of freshly grated pecorino.
Drizzle a little olive oil on top.
Bake in the oven according to your specific temperature and style of oven. I use a wood fired oven and like to keep it around 750-800F and it cooks in about 2-3 minutes, constantly rotating the pie with a peel. If baking in a conventional oven, this will typically be at a lower temperature (550F) and it will take several more minutes.
Remove from the oven and finish with some more freshly grated pecorino and fresh basil leaves.
Slice and enjoy!

After much trial and error I’ve landed on a Grandma style pan pizza dough formulation that I’m really happy with. The end result is a 75% hydration naturally leavened dough that yields a wonderfully light and thin pizza with crispy edges. It’s a higher hydration pizza dough but because there really is no shaping involved it’s very easy to work with. The fermentation time is very flexible; from 20 hrs up to 36 hrs once it goes into the refrigerator. In my opinion, the key things for a Grandma pie are 1) lots of garlic 2) a classic red sauce on top of the cheese 3) a thin, crispy edged dough baked in a pan vs directly on a stone.

The Dough

Ingredients

533 grams Type 0 Manitoba Flour

400 grams Water

96 grams Active Starter

10 grams Salt

These quantities are designed for 2 X 11” x 14” pans.

Mix together the water and the flour and set to autolyse for one hour up to six hours. At about 7 pm add the salt and active sourdough starter and start working into the dough with your hands or with a rubber spatula until more or less homogenous. Let rest for 45 minutes.
You’ll want to fold the dough two more times (with your hands) over the course of the next 1 - 2 hours to develop the gluten. By the end the dough should be very smooth and should not stick to your hands while folding. Cover and rest overnight at room temperature.
In the morning (approximately 7am) divide the dough and keep in air tight containers. Transfer to the refrigerator and take out 30 minutes before you’ll be making your pizza. If making pizza that evening you’re looking at about 12 hours of room temperature fermentation followed by about 10 hours of cold fermentation. I’ve kept the dough in the fridge until the next day and still have been very pleased with the results. If baking early in the day, there’s no need to put it into the fridge. You can transfer directly to your baking pan from the bulk ferment container.

Classic Grandma Recipe

Ingredients

Olive Oil

Red Sauce (see recipe for red sauce here)

Shredded mozzarella cheese

Thinly sliced garlic (2 -3 cloves)

Grated parmesan

Basil

Instructions

Set oven to 425F.
Slice 2-3 cloves of garlic as thin as you can. Cover them with enough olive oil so they are completely submerged in a small bowl.
After the dough has come to room temperature, dump it out into a well oiled pan. Spread the dough out so it has a uniform thickness. Use the tips of your fingers to press down into dough to push it into the edges of the pan. Pop any large bubbles. Grandma is a generally thinner pie, so it should be worked into the pan fairly well. Drizzle a little more olive oil on top.
Cover the entire surface of the dough with shredded cheese.
Ladle on the tomato sauce generously on top of the cheese. For Grandma style pies I like to ladle on dollops of sauce evenly, but leave a little cheese exposed for visual effect.
Spoon on the thinly sliced garlic over the surface along with some of the oil.
Sprinkle freshly grated parmesan or pecorino on top.
Bake for 25 - 30 minutes and serve.
Garnish with fresh basil.

Other Variations

Using this dough recipe as a foundation, the possibilities are endless. Here are a few of my favorites so far.

Marinated artichoke, prosciutto, pickled pepperoncini peppers, mozzarella, grated cacciocavallo, basil.

Nduja, Broccoli rabe, red onion, mozzarella, red sauce base.

Sun Gold Margherita

Grandma Style Pan Pizza 2.0