The one that tells you whether your dough is any good. Three toppings, nowhere to hide.
John Drummond
Mise en place
Tick each one off as it goes in.
Makes 4 serves
The Margherita is the test. There are three things on it and none of them can be hidden behind, so if the base is wrong you will know, and so will everyone else at the table. Get this one right and the rest of the list is just shopping.
Basil goes on twice — chopped underneath where it cooks into the cheese, and whole leaves on top at the end so you get the raw smell of it when the plate arrives. One decent leaf per slice.
The method
Oven as hot as it goes, and get it there early: an hour before you want to eat, with the stone or the steel already in. Domestic ovens lie about being ready. Lighting the fire instead? Floor around 400°C and a flame licking the dome. This is the whole recipe, really; the rest is assembly.
Crush the San Marzanos by hand. Salt, a dash of pepper, the garlic only if you want it. Do not cook this sauce. It gets all the cooking it needs on the base; simmer it first and it goes sweet and dull.
One ball of my pizza dough, rested: the flour, wine and oil above make one batch, four bases, as the Pizza Dough recipe says. Knuckles, not a rolling pin. A pin drives the air out of the rim and it never comes back. Middle out, outer two centimetres left alone, then pick it up and let gravity finish it. If it fights you, it is not rested: walk away for ten minutes rather than force it.
Olive oil on the bare base before the sauce goes anywhere near it. It seals the dough: a crisp base, not a sodden middle. Good Italian oil. You will taste it.
A thin layer, spiralled out from the middle with the back of a spoon, stopped short of the rim. You should still see dough through it. Drown a Margherita and it is soup.
Tear the buffalo mozzarella, don't slice it, and give it ten minutes on paper first. Wet mozzarella is the second most common way to ruin this pizza. Scatter it, don't tile it. Bare patches.
Halved cherry tomatoes, cut side up, so they concentrate instead of leaking. The chopped basil goes underneath now, where the heat gets to it.
In it goes. Six to eight minutes in a domestic oven at full noise, ninety seconds in a fire. Leopard spots on the rim, the cheese just gone to liquid. Not browned: browned mozzarella has gone.
Whole basil leaves on the second it comes out, at least one to a slice, and the last drizzle of oil. Cut it and eat it standing up. A Margherita waits for nobody.
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