Pizza with a view: the purchase of our author has become an attraction for the children in the neighborhood
Source: Clark Parkin / ooni
A special gastronomic scene has developed around the preparation of the classic Napoletana pizza in recent years - with restaurants such as the “485 Grad” in Cologne, the “Standard” in Berlin and the “Nine O Five” with branches in Munich, Düsseldorf, Augsburg and Jena.
At least as active is a community of amateur pizza bakers who present their own attempts on social media and intensively exchange ideas about the smallest details.
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In the home kitchen, baking a real pizza based on the Neapolitan model often fails because of the temperature.
485 degrees are considered optimal - no regular oven for domestic use and only very few, very expensive outdoor grills can do that.
Even if you turn on your stove to full and heat the pizza stone directly under the heating coil for an hour, temperatures of over 270 degrees are difficult to achieve.
And the popular attachments for the kettle grill in the garden only manage around 300 degrees.
A convincing solution for the home comes from Scotland of all places: a portable pizza oven that is fired with wood pellets.
The oven
The married couple Kristian Tapaninaho and Darina Garland from Edinburgh invented it in 2012 and launched it on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.
Your company Ooni now sells pizza ovens in 100 countries.
There is a whole range of models in different sizes and with different firing techniques, including the “Karu” model, which is fired with 15 cm long logs, preferably beech wood or oak, and creates an incomparable wood-fired pizza taste when you try it yourself.
The device, which costs around 350 euros, reaches the desired temperature in 15 minutes; a digital temperature gun should be available for control purposes.
As in a Neapolitan pizzeria, the baking time is only 60 seconds, after half the pizza has to be turned, otherwise it will char on one side and not get the characteristic stippling of small, dark dough bubbles.
Instead of relying on your sense of time, it's better to use a timer.
The portable oven reaches a temperature of 485 degrees in 15 minutes
Source: Clark Parkin / ooni
The dough
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Flour, water, yeast, salt - kneading them into dough shouldn't be difficult.
For real pizza nerds, however, there is only one real flour, namely the one used by the Pizzaiolos in Naples.
It comes from the company Caputo * and is sold with the designation “00”, pronounced “zero zero”.
A higher proportion of protein and gluten ensures the necessary elasticity of the dough.
You can order it on the Internet, but it doesn't have any taste advantage compared to good pizza flour from a local organic mill.
If you follow the right recipe, both will work.
What is important is the fermentation time of the dough, which only produces a pizza taste to make you kneel down after 72 hours of cold fermentation.
There are various tutorials on YouTube, and the freely available app from the oven manufacturer Ooni is also helpful, with which you can calculate the quantities of ingredients, fermentation times and refrigerator temperatures to the nearest decimal point.
With a precision balance and sturdy arms, the rest is a breeze.
With a minimal use of yeast, a pizza dough is created in three days, which is much more digestible than a dough with more yeast that only goes for a short time and sometimes leads to an unpleasant feeling of bloating in the stomach.
Five hours before baking, the dough is divided into balls weighing approximately 200 grams, sprinkled with flour, protected from drying out with a damp cloth and fermented further at room temperature.
To pull out the dough, you shouldn't use a rolling pin that pushes the air bubbles out of the dough, but rotate the dough pieces floating freely like a steering wheel and shape them with a thick edge bead and a thin center.
From now on, precise and fast action is required.
Once laid out and coated with the sauce, the dough quickly becomes soaked and sticks to the shovel.
Top chef Nenad Mlinarevic noticed that it is not a good idea to reserve pizza when Tim Mälzer sent him to a Neapolitan pizzeria in an episode of “Kitchen Impossible”.
Dusting the work surface with Semola Rimacinata *, a coarse flour that is otherwise used to make pasta, has proven to be an effective remedy for sticky pizza dough.
The sugo
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A Napoletana pizza should only be topped with San Marzano tomatoes.
Even more important is the consistency of the sugo, which should not be boiled down as is done in most pizzerias.
The tomato freshness of a classic margherita is created by hand-crushed, lightly salted and peeled bottle tomatoes, which should be preserved in their own juice, but not in a thick pulp.
In the minute in the oven, the tomato water should be able to evaporate easily.
If you use a pureed tomato passata instead of the crushed tomatoes, it will soak the dough too much and lose too little liquid during baking.
Here it is worth investing in the quality of the canned tomatoes.
Particularly good tomatoes are not canned but preserved in a jar, for example the Pomodori Pelati by Paolo Petrilli * from Apulia, which can be ordered on the Internet.
60 seconds cooking time: pizza with salami, olives and spring onions
Source: Clark Parkin / ooni
The topping
In addition to the sugo, all you need is some grated pecorino and a good mozzarella, which is best plucked into small pieces so that it melts well.
Instead of the rubber bullets from the refrigerated counters, which are sold as mozzarella in Germany, buffalo mozzarella is recommended.
In Naples, the pizza is topped with the cheaper Fior-di-Latte cheese, which is difficult to find in Germany in the local quality.
In addition, a type of basil is traditionally used in Naples, known as "Valentino" or "Grande Foglia", which develops a light aniseed note and has considerably more meaty leaves than the Genovese basil, which is popular in Germany.
In summer you can occasionally find it at well-stocked greengrocers.
You shouldn't bake the smaller Genovese leaves, but sprinkle them on the pizza afterwards, because otherwise they quickly lose their aroma.
Whether you drizzle olive oil on the pizza is a matter of taste, but after baking, a little oregano is essential.
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Whether topped with salami, anchovies or olives, as a diavolo with spicy sausage, peperoncini or pickled peppers: There are almost no limits to the pizza variations, you shouldn't load your flatbreads too heavily, otherwise you will end up with a courageous jerk with the shovel instead of the pizza only the topping in the oven.
The only culinary sacrilege is the Hawaiian pizza, but when the children in the neighborhood beam at you and praise the Hawaiian pizza from the wood-fired oven, which is topped with canned pineapple and boiled ham, you have to have a heart of cold pizza stone to avoid the dogma to reconsider.
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