Can you do Neapolitan Style Pizza at home? Yes, but no

Last updated on November 12th, 2023 at 06:57 pm

Is not too hard to find on the Web a tutorial on how to make Neapolitan style pizza at home. Have you tried some of them? Years ago I did. If you ask me about my results I can tell that they were poor. Therefore a question: is it really possible to do Neapolitan Style Pizza at home? The answer is: yes, but no.

So, I am not giving you one more special method and yet another pizza recipe. I want to tell you what is the secret to do it! Then we will also discuss some of the methods I have seen around. Of course I will also share my recipe for Neapolitan Style Pizza.

What is the secrets? I want to eat Neapolitan Style Pizza!

I wrote about this topic in another blog post. Well, actually not entirely same topic but similar. The secret for a perfect Neapolitan Style Pizza is the oven! Yes, you read this right, the oven. Does not matter the recipe, ingredients, how good you mixed them. If you do not have the proper oven you will not get even close to the real Neapolitan Style Pizza.

The oven you need should go ideally up to 500 °C, even though 450 °C will do the job pretty well too.

I personally use at home a gas oven (Ooni Koda 16) but the market is full of different options you can look at. For sure, without high temperature the results will be really poor. Specifically you will get a Pizza that is crunchy like a biscuit (in Italy we often compare a bad Neapolitan Pizza to a biscuit indeed :D).

On the opposite side, pizza has to be soft. You should be able to bend the slices from the crust.

Can you explain a bit more? How to make Neapolitan style pizza at home?

Yes, to make Neapolitan style pizza you need to cook the pizza dough fast. Normally between 60 and 90 seconds.

You can understand that to achieve such a quick cooking you want to have the right temperatures. Being at 500 °C you dry the pizza dough properly while the crust (without topping) inflates pretty fast. If you do not cook enough the pizza dough you have a raw dough that makes hard the digestion.

At the same time, if you are at lower temperatures what happens? Even if you are at 300/350 °C the cooking is not going to work as you can imagine. In fact you will need to cook the pizza dough for too long. The effect of that is that the dough dries to much. Therefore the biscuit effect.

What can I do if I do not have high temperature oven?

Well, I would say: try a different Italian style pizza as first 🙂 You have a lot of options you can use. Included some examples on this website.

Actually the majority of the methods that you find on YouTube – or in general online – are exactly trying to overcome the problem of not having a proper oven. Honestly speaking I don’t think they are really worth a try, unless…

Unless you are prepared to:

• have a super crunchy pizza, not Neapolitan style
• put a lot of efforts not using proper equipment
• risk of hurt yourself trying to reach the highest possible temperature
• spend pretty high amount of time to cook each pizza

To me is pretty fine if you want to try yourself 🙂 I did it as well. A couple of times. Then I decided that it was not worth it.

I want to try anyway, what do you suggest?

Ok, if you decided to spend several minutes in cooking a single Neapolitan style pizza at home then I can help you with that.

Let me give you my list of suggestions:

• prepare no more than 2 or 3 dough balls: it will take several minutes for each
• try this just for yourself first and see if you like it, I did it with my wife as my victim 😀
• make smaller dough balls: 220/230 gr are even too big sometimes
• have patience
• lower your expectations: sometimes on YouTube there are cheaters 😉

Can you suggest a method to try?

I told you to have patience, right? If you have enough, I think that the best method is the one from Gigio Attanasio:

Gigio Attanasio defines this the Combo Method. Reason is that you use at the same time the home oven and a normal pan. Be prepared though: results are decent but still far from the original Neapolitan Style Pizza.

Conclusion: recipe Neapolitan style pizza

My recipe is coming directly from my Pizza Calculator. I think is the most balanced one. Even if you are trying any of the methods showing how to make Neapolitan style pizza at home without a proper oven it will work. The only suggestion I have is to to make the dough balls much smaller.

Here is an example for 4 dough balls of 210 grams each:

If you have questions or comment you can always contact me!

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