Pizza Pugliese
Olives and capers from Puglia, onions, mozzarella and tomato. A southern pizza.
Start cookingIn JD’s words
Pugliese is built on what Puglia has — the olives and the capers are the local ingredients and the onion is what makes it southern rather than Neapolitan.
Cook the onions down first. Raw onion on a pizza that is only in the oven for seven minutes comes out raw onion, and it will be the only thing anyone tastes.
The method
Cook it unhurried.
- 01
Oven, Hot
Get the oven as hot as it will go, and get it there early — an hour before you want to eat, with the stone or the steel already in it. Domestic ovens lie about being ready. If you are lighting the fire instead, you want the floor around 400°C and a flame licking the dome. This is the whole recipe, really: everything else is assembly.
- 02
Onions, Down
Slice the onion thin and cook it down slowly in olive oil until it is soft and sweet — fifteen minutes, no colour, no rush. This is the only real cooking in the recipe and skipping it is the difference between a Pugliese and a raw onion sandwich.
- 03
Sauce, Raw
Crush the San Marzanos by hand, salt them, a dash of pepper, and the garlic only if you want it. Do not cook this sauce. It gets all the cooking it needs on the base, and a sauce that has been simmered first goes sweet and dull by the time it comes out.
- 04
Base, Stretch
Knuckles, not a rolling pin. A rolling pin drives the air out of the rim and you will never get it back. Work from the middle out, leave the outer two centimetres alone, and let gravity do the last of it — pick it up and let the weight of the dough pull it round. If it fights you, it is not rested. Walk away for ten minutes rather than force it.
- 05
Oil, First
Olive oil on the bare base before the sauce goes anywhere near it. It seals the dough so the sauce cannot soak in and make the middle sodden, and it is the difference between a crisp base and a wet one. Good Italian oil — you will taste it.
- 06
Build It
Sauce thin, then the torn mozzarella, then the cooked onions spread over the top. Olives and rinsed capers last so they sit proud rather than sinking.
- 07
Bake
Six to eight minutes at full heat. The olives should just start to wrinkle. A pinch of dried oregano and a final drizzle of oil as it comes out.
Cook this next