How to make the perfect pizza and the common mistakes to avoid

Your guide to making the ultimate pizza at home. Here are all the tips and tricks to making a restaurant-style pizza every time

It is possible to make perfect pizza in the comfort of your own home.

Don't rush the process

Now that we all know how to make sourdough, and understand what a precious baby bread can be, it makes sense that pizza dough can benefit from a slow rise. Of course, you can make the dough and rise it in under three hours, but a long slow ferment in the fridge overnight like in the recipe below, results in a much more flavourful and ultimately delicious pizza. 

Use this method for your yeast

When you are preparing your dough, pour the water into the bottom of the bowl, followed by the yeast, flour and salt. Salt directly on yeast will kill it. Equally, water that is too hot will hamper the rise, so follow the rule of one part hot water to two parts cold. That makes the perfect yeast-friendly water temperature. 

Raw or cooked, use a homemade sauce

A pizza sauce takes fifteen minutes to cook and is worth the little effort (try the one below). If cooking a sauce is completely beyond you, open a tin of crushed tomatoes (Mutti are always delicious) and grate in one clove of garlic. Follow with a healthy pinch of salt and a glug of olive oil and you have a delicious sauce that will cook as the pizza bakes. 

Cook when the oven is screaming hot

Take out any cooking tins that you may not have cleaned fully (you know who you are) and turn that temperature up as high as it can go. Leave it heating for at least forty five minutes, until the oven is so hot that when you open the door a blast of heat comes out. Twenty minutes before you cook, put the pizza trays in the oven. If you are using a pizza stone, then it should be in the oven from the very beginning. 

Go easy on the toppings

A lot of us have a tendency to attack pizza-making in a more-is-more capacity. This is the wrong approach. Do not use homemade pizza as a vehicle for eighteen different types of meat, a full bag of grated cheese and some pineapple. Pizza should be cooked in minutes, so that means a light scattering of cheese and whatever else you are topping it with.

Consider your cheese

We know you love your buffalo mozzarella, but this is not the time to use it. Mozzarella that is sold in the little bags full of liquid is too wet to use on your pizza, and it will make it soggy. Choose a mozzarella you can grate instead. 

Stretch, don't roll

Rolling pizza dough ensures that all of the air pockets you have created through your slow rise are now dead, and your pizza will be flat and not as delicious as it could be. Using the flat of your palm, press the dough down, rotating and stretching as though you were moving around a clock at fifteen-minute intervals. You will not have a perfectly round pizza, but you will have one that bubbles and chars just like you find in a restaurant. 

Consider the par-bake

For the ultimate crispy base, place stretched pizza dough with smear of sauce on a baking tray and cook for about seven minutes before adding more sauce and your toppings and cooking again for another seven to ten minutes. This ensures a crispy bottom and a cheesy bubbling top. 

Don't dive in straight away

You're not an animal, and pizza tastes so much better once it has had five minutes to cool. 

Colm O'Gorman's Pizza Sauce

Ingredients

• 300g cherry tomatoes 
• 1 tbsp tomato purée 
• 1 shallot 
• 1 clove garlic 
• A little olive oil 
• 1 tbsp honey 
• Salt and pepper

Method

To make the sauce, cut tomatoes into quarters. Finely chop the shallot and garlic. Cook in a small pan with a splash of olive oil until soft. Add the chopped tomato, tomato purée and the honey. Season with salt and pepper. Cook on a medium heat, stirring occasionally until the tomatoes break down and the sauce thickens. This takes bout 15 minutes.

Philip Dennhardt’s Classic Pizza Dough. Picture:  Mowie Kay

Philip Dennhardt’s Classic Pizza Dough 

Makes enough for 4 x 25 cm (10 in) pizzas 

Ingredients

• 400 ml cold water 
• 600g ‘00’ flour or strong white flour, plus extra for dusting 
• 1 x 7g sachet of fast-action dried yeast 
• 1 tsp fine sea salt 

Method

Pour the water into the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook, then add the flour to the water and add the yeast and salt in separate piles. Mix for 10 minutes on a medium–low speed. For the first few minutes, it will look shaggy and you might be worried that it won’t come together, but leave it be and by the end of the 10 minutes the dough should be smooth, springy and slightly sticky. Check the dough after a couple of minutes, though, to see how it’s coming along.

If it’s really dry and isn’t coming together, add another tablespoon of water. If it looks really wet, add another tablespoon of flour. Alternatively, if you don’t have a mixer, you can knead the dough by hand. Sprinkle your work surface with a little flour and tip the dough out onto it. Knead it by hand a few times to bring it together into a smooth, round ball that holds its shape well and springs back when you poke it. If it doesn’t pass those tests, knead it for 1–2 minutes more.

Using a dough cutter or a sharp knife, cut the dough in half. Pressing it firmly into the work surface, roll each piece into a smooth round, like a tennis ball. Put the dough balls on two side plates or a baking tray dusted with flour. Cover tightly with cling-film/plastic wrap or soak a clean tea towel in cold running water from the tap and wring it out really well, then cover the dough with the damp cloth.

Place the covered plates or tray in the fridge for at least 6 hours, but ideally overnight or even up to 48 hours to let it have a long fermentation and a slow rise. The longer you let the dough sit in the fridge, the more flavour it will have.

Take the dough out of the fridge one hour before you want to cook the pizzas, making sure you keep it covered with the clingfilm/plastic wrap or damp cloth so it doesn’t dry out. When you’re ready to shape the dough, dust a pizza peel or a thin wooden chopping board generously with flour. You can either stretch the dough by hand or use a rolling pin. If you’re using a rolling pin, dust that with flour too.

Take the rested dough ball off the plate or tray using a dough cutter or a bowl scraper, making sure the dough ball stays round at this point. Place the dough ball onto the floured peel or board and dust some flour on top of the dough too. Press down the middle of the dough with your fingers, but don’t press the edge of the dough ball, as that will be the crust later. It should already look like a little pizza.

The dough is now ready to be stretched by hand or rolled.

• From Saturday Pizzas at Ballymaloe Cookery School by Philip Dennhardt and Kristin Jensen, photographer Mowie Kay and published by Ryland Peters & Small.

Why not try these perfect pizza topping suggestions?

• Mushroms fried in butter, garlic and thyme with goat's cheese.
• Roast butternut squash and chorizo with red onion
• Bacon, roast tomato and an egg cracked in the middle before baking
• Pepperoni, pickled jalapeño peppers, onion