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RECIPES | Making pizza at home is such a simple and rewarding thing to do, but it’s often quite hard to replicate what you find at a proper Italian pizzeria. We’ve tried many different things over the years and have settled on a simple, affordable method for making great pizzas at home. Sure it’s not going to match a wood-fired pizza, but for the time and effort required you’ll be more than happy.
One of the simplest and tastiest pizzas for us is the Neapolitan classic, pizza Margherita. That simple blend of tomatoes, mozzarella, fresh basil and olive oil sends us to a happy place every time we take a bite. There a lots of stories about how the pizza Margherita originated, and while nobody knows for certain which is true, it’s been around since at least 1796. It’s all about simplicity, and quality ingredients, and is everything a pizza should be.
Preparation Time: 10 minutes / Cooking Time: 8 minutes / Serves: 1
Ingredients
- 1 Lebanese-style flatbread (~10 inches)
- 100g passata/pizza sauce
- half buffalo mozzarella ball (~50g), cut into 1.5-2cm chunks
- 4 cherry tomatoes, halved
- 10 fresh basil leaves
- extra virgin olive oil to finish
Method
- Preheat your oven to 250°C (480°F) fan forced.
- Put a sheet of baking paper onto a tray and put the flatbread on top.
- Use the back of a spoon to spread the passata evenly across the flatbread. Depending on the size of your flatbread you may need less – you want an even cover, but you don’t want to drench the base in sauce
- Place the mozzarella and cherry tomatoes evenly across the base
- Put the pizza in the oven for 7-8 minutes.
- Take the pizza out of the oven. The base should be crispy on the outside, and the mozzarella should be mostly melted, but not burned.
- Use a paper towel or napkin to lightly dab any excess moisture off the top of the pizza.
- Evenly place the basil leaves onto the pizza, and drizzle with olive oil. Cut into four or six pieces and enjoy immediately.
Notes
You can use cow’s milk mozzarella if you can’t find buffalo mozzarella – it’s a pretty good substitute, but doesn’t have quite the same creaminess to it.
We use Lebanese-style flatbread as our base because it crisps up just right in 8 minutes. You can use other kinds of flatbread or pizza bases of course, but for our oven pizza method we often find that they remain too soft, and if you cook them longer the other ingredients become overcooked.