Pizza Napoletana

Pizza is the perfect food, or so I’m so often told. When I moved to Providence, Rhode Island, I’d heard that there was great pizza to be had, so I asked everyone I met to recommend his or her favorite place. They all seemed to have a different style that they preferred, not unlike the diversity I’ve found in similar explorations into barbecue and chili. There is Sicilian thick-crusted pizza and thin New York style (the kind where the nose of the slice has to be flipped back into the center of the slice to keep all the cheese from running off). At least two-dozen franchise pizza shops exist within a three-mile radius of my home, some with prebaked shells, others with house-made crust. There are double-decker pizzas, cheese-in-the-crust pizzas, and a very popular twice-baked crust, recently dubbed Argentinian pizza in some regions, but here it is mysteriously and incorrectly referred to as Neapolitan. The best pizza I’ve had in recent years was in Phoenix at Pizzeria Bianco, a small restaurant run by Chris Bianco and his friends and family. Chris grows his own basil and lettuce behind the restaurant, makes his own mozzarella cheese, and hand-mixes his pizza dough in large batches (I mean really hand-mixes, on a bench and by hand). It is wet dough, like ciabatta, and sits for hours slowly fermenting. His is the closest I’ve had to pizza made in the style of Naples: simple, thin crusted, and baked fast and crisp. Pizzeria Bianco serves only about six kinds of pizza, a house salad, house-made Italian bread (from the pizza dough), and three or so desserts made by Chris’s mom. They can’t keep up with the business, and getting a seat in the pizzeria is like winning the lottery. Naples is the birthplace of what we today call pizza. Genoa has its focaccia, Tuscany its schiacciata, and Sicily its sfincione, but true Neapolitan pizza is the perfect expression of the perfect food. Every other style may also be crust and topping, but life would be better if only this superior version were allowed to call itself pizza. More to the point, it is possible to make a great pizza at home even if your oven cannot reach the heat levels used by the very best pizzerias that burn hardwood or bituminous coal and reach between 800° and 1200°F! Jeffrey Steingarten wrote a wonderful piece in the August 2000 issue of Vogue in which he told of trying dozens of ways to generate enough heat to replicate a pizza oven in his home. He nearly burned down his house in the process. Unfortunately, most home ovens will not go beyond 550°F, if that, but the following dough will produce an amazing pizza even at that relatively low heat. It has long been my contention that it is the crust, not the toppings, that make a pizza memorable. I’ve seen some expensive, wonderful ingredients wasted on bad crust, or, even more often, a decent dough ruined in an oven that was not hot enough to bake it properly. For many years, cookbook instructions have been to bake at about 350°F or maybe at 425°F. Rarely do you see instructions that suggest cranking the oven to its fullest capacity, but that’s what you have to do to make a great pizza at home. The single biggest flaw in most pizza dough recipes is the failure to instruct the maker to allow the dough to rest overnight in the refrigerator (or at least for a long time). This gives the enzymes time to go to work, pulling out subtle flavor trapped in the starch. The long rest also relaxes the gluten, allowing you to shape the dough easily, minimizing the elastic springiness that so often forces you to squeeze out all the gas. Lately, there’s been a controversy regarding what type of flour to use. Unbleached is a given. It simply delivers more flavor and aroma. For the past few years the trend has been toward high-gluten or bread flour because it promotes oven spring and holds together better during handling (this is called dough “tolerance”)...