How to Make Homemade Pizza That Rivals a Pizzeria
2025-01-21 · 7 min read
The biggest obstacle to great homemade pizza is your oven. A commercial pizza oven runs at 800 to 900 degrees Fahrenheit. Your home oven tops out around 500 to 550. This means your crust will never develop the same leopard-spotted char in the same timeframe. But you can close the gap dramatically with the right dough, technique, and one critical piece of equipment: a pizza steel.
The Baking Steel, a quarter-inch thick slab of steel, conducts heat far more efficiently than a pizza stone and produces a crispier bottom crust. Preheat it at your oven's maximum temperature for a full hour before baking. The thermal mass stored in the steel transfers directly to the dough the moment it lands, giving you a crust that blisters and chars in ways a stone cannot match.
The dough requires patience. A simple recipe: 500 grams bread flour, 325 grams water, 10 grams salt, 3 grams instant yeast, and 10 grams olive oil. Mix, knead for eight minutes, divide into three balls, and cold-ferment in the fridge for 24 to 72 hours. The long fermentation develops flavor and creates the airy, bubbly texture that separates great dough from flatbread.
Sauce should be uncooked. Crush a can of San Marzano tomatoes by hand, add a pinch of salt, a drizzle of olive oil, and a few torn basil leaves. That is it. Cooking the sauce before it goes on the pizza results in a dull, overly sweet topping. The raw sauce cooks on the pizza in the oven, maintaining its brightness and acidity. Less is more. Do not drown the dough.
Stretch the dough by hand on a floured surface, working from the center outward and letting gravity help. Do not use a rolling pin, which degasses the dough and kills the texture. Top minimally: sauce, fresh mozzarella torn into pieces, a drizzle of olive oil, and basil added after baking. Launch it onto the preheated steel and bake for six to eight minutes. The result will not be a pizzeria pie. It will be close enough to make you never order delivery again.
