Dr Mobeus
Homemade Pizza Margherita
A delivery pizza now costs somewhere between £12 and £20 once the app has finished adding fees. The same margherita made at home costs about £1.40, which is not a typo. Flour, water, a sachet of yeast, a tin of tomatoes and one ball of mozzarella is genuinely all a margherita has ever been.
The real cost is time, and there is less of it than people think. The dough takes 15 minutes of actual work, then rises on its own for an hour while you do something else. The sauce simmers for 10 minutes in that same hour. Assembly is 3 minutes, the oven does the last 12.
The trick borrowed from every good pizzeria is heat. A domestic oven on its highest setting, with the pizza slid onto a screaming-hot baking sheet, gets closer to proper pizza than most people expect. Around 35p a portion means the family pizza night costs less than one slice of the delivery version.
Homemade Pizza Margherita
Ingredients
Method
- Stir the yeast and sugar into the warm water and leave for 5 minutes until foamy. If it does not foam, the yeast is dead and the dough will not rise, so start again with a fresh sachet.
- Mix the flour and salt in a large bowl, add the yeasty water and the olive oil, and bring together into a rough dough. Knead on a work surface for 5-8 minutes until smooth and springy.
- Shape into a ball, put it back in the bowl with a wipe of oil round it, cover with a damp tea towel and leave somewhere warm for about an hour until doubled in size.
- Meanwhile make the sauce: put the tomatoes, garlic, oregano and a pinch of salt in a small pan and simmer for 10 minutes until thick and no longer watery. Season to taste, it should taste slightly too strong on its own because the dough will dilute it.
- Heat the oven to its highest setting, 240C/220C fan or hotter, with a baking sheet inside to heat up. Push the risen dough out on a floured surface into a 30cm round, pressing from the middle outwards and leaving a slightly thicker rim.
- Slide the base onto the hot sheet, spread over the sauce, scatter the mozzarella and drizzle with a little oil. Bake for 10-14 minutes until the edges are puffed and golden and the middle is bubbling. Rest for a couple of minutes before cutting.
Tips and Variations
A long slow rise makes better dough, so if you have the time leave it 3-4 hours at room temperature instead of one. The hot baking sheet is doing the job of a pizza stone, so do not skip preheating it. Do not overload the topping, wet toppings make soggy middles, and slightly too-thick sauce is better than runny. Any dough left over keeps a day in the fridge or a month in the freezer.
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