From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-VRntrbypI&t=217s

Ingredients:

  • 500g strong flour (he says make sure it’s strong, not soft – I’ve just been using the stuff you get in any supermarket in Brazil that mentions pizza on it and it seems to have worked fine, but she says that Marché has strong flour)
  • 3g of salt (can go up to 5g, above that it will affect the yeast)
  • 325ml cold water
  • some amount of yeast (see instructions on packet, which normally talk about how much you need for a given weight of flour)

Method:

  1. Put the flour in a bowl, add the salt, mix well with a spoon.
  2. Add the water.
  3. Add the yeast.
  4. Mix it with a spoon. It’ll look dry but it’s not.
  5. Then mix it with your hands in the bowl.
  6. Then dump it out onto a table and knead.
  7. Put a damp cloth over the bowl, leave for half an hour. Should have grown a fair bit
  8. Cut in half. (In fact, I find this to make pizzas that don’t fit in the nonstick circular tray; I normally cut in 4.)
  9. With each half, tuck the edges under, then roll it with your hands on top to make a cute little ball.
  10. Leave for another half an hour (in the video he just leaves them on the counter, not sure if that’s okay; I normally do it in a couple of big tupperwares with damp teatowels on top. Remember to put flour in the tupperwares!)

Notes

  • To pre-bake the dough, roll it out, brush it with a little olive oil and bake at max temp for ~2 mins (maybe 2:30 depending on thickness), just enough to make it easier to work with later or to be able to freeze as a disc. I’d suggest always doing this.
  • Nonstick baking tray is the way to go, greaseproof paper is a nuisance and sticks.
  • Be careful when rolling to try and keep it in a circular shape; it can easily get weird pointy corners.
  • If the room is too cold for good proving, can put a pan of boiling water at the bottom of the oven and put the dough pan there with it.
  • Gennaro puts the parmesan just after the tomato
  • You should be able to do everything in the pan, chopping board, and baking tray — to avoid having to mess with worktop
  • Use Renata flour and Fleischmann yeast

Some further notes about rolling, 24 Feb 2023

This is the closest I’ve come to a consistent method that isn’t too terrifying and works pretty well. It was pretty much all Gabriela’s idea.

  1. The aim is to first of all get a disc of whatever thickness. If you take it out of the tupperware and remains a disc, lovely. Else, turn it back into a nice little round by doing the same “roll him on top” from step 9 above. Then, use fingers to gently turn it into a squat little disc.
  2. Now, switch to rolling pin, applying gentle strokes from the centre outwards. Once the centre starts to get flatter than the edges, start the strokes from further out.
  3. Once it’s a larger disc (but possibly still quite small and thick), transfer it to the baking tray. It’s easier to finish off the rolling there, because transferring a very thin disc to the tray is hard (it stretches and tears).
  4. Now finish off inside the tray with fingers, slowly stretching all over and trying to maintain a circular shape and even thickness.

Baking the pizza

Max temperature