Making Homemade Italian Pizza

Last week, our new friend taught us how to make homemade, authentic, and delicious Italian pizza. He made it look very easy, but yesterday was the first day we tried to make it ourselves. In fact, it's not hard to make your own pizza and it's really fun! I think the hardest part is making the dough (pasta as they call it here) from scratch. Here's a little step-by-step in case you want to try making Italian pizza at home.

1. Pour a packet of yeast into a cup and add lukewarm water to it. Also add a bit of sugar to it, since sugar is a "friend" or "amico" of yeast. Stir thoroughly and wait for the yeast to rise.

Yeast for the Pasta (dough)

2. While waiting for the yeast to rise, pour about 500 grams of flour (type 0) into a bowl. Add around 4 teaspoons of salt to the flour and stir in. Salt is an amico of flour, but a "nemico" or "enemy" of yeast. This awesome terminology is all from our Italian amico, by the way.

Flour or "Farina"

3. After your yeast has risen a bit, stir it into the flour. Knead the dough with your hands and add water as needed (but try not to add too much water). Place the dough on a firm surface and knead it and slap it into the table for about 10 minutes (or until the dough starts cleaning the table and no longer leaves bits of residue behind).

Knead the dough

As seen in the picture above, just act like a hand model and place your hand gently on the dough....just kidding! You have to slap that dough around.

4. Place the dough into a pot or plastic bin and cover it with a damp and warm towel. Leave the dough in a warm place to rise for about 3-4 hours. You can let the pasta rise for longer (about a day) but then you'll just use less yeast for the recipe.

Dough covered with warm towel

5. After the dough has risen sufficiently, remove the towel and separate the dough (cut it in half if you want to make 2 pizzas, for example). Start rolling the dough into the shapes that you want with either your hands or a rolling pin. You can put some flour on your hands so that they don't stick to the dough. Before you place the dough into pans, lightly oil the pans with some olive oil.

The dough rolled out into pans

6. Sauce the pizzas. We used store-bought tomato sauce for ours.

Saucy!

7. Here's the fun part! Add whatever toppings you want. For our first pizza, we added pepperoni (salame piccante) and mozzarella cheese. For the second pizza, we added fresh basil and buffalo mozzarella. We may have added too much cheese (is that even a thing?) because it spilled over onto the crust a bit. Pro tip: Drizzle a bit of good quality olive oil over the pizzas before cooking.

Assembled Pizzas with Toppings

8. Hopefully your oven is preheated by now, at about the hottest setting, short of broiling. Place pizzas in and take them out when the cheese is golden and bubbly (for us that was around 16 minutes).

Pepperoni Pizza

Buffalo Mozzarella Pizza

9. Enjoy that delicious pizza that you made all by yourself!

And now you know how to make your very own authentic Italian pizza. I imagine I'll be making this many more times in the future, and hopefully I'll continue to improve my pizza-making skills.

Italian phrase for the day: Che pizza che sei! This literally means "What a pizza you are!"  Now, this sounds like a cute term of endearment, but it actually means "You're a pain in the ***."  So there you have it.

Ciao a tutti,
Susie