Margherita pizza

Before you start

• the dough needs about 1h30 to prove — or start at the sauce with two shop-bought bases
• an oven at its absolute hottest, with a heavy tray or a stone heated inside it

Ingredients

Serves 2 · dimmer marks are storecupboard

• 320gplain flour — strong bread flour if you have it — it takes more water and stretches further
• 1 tspdried yeast
• 160gpassata
• 180gbuffalo mozzarella
• 1 tbspolive oil
• 1 handfulbasil
• to tastesalt

Method

6 steps

1. fold · 10m

   Flour, yeast, two teaspoons of salt and about 210ml of warm water mixed to a shaggy mass, then kneaded until it is smooth and elastic and stops sticking to the board. Ten minutes by hand, and it goes from ragged to silky quite suddenly near the end.

2. rest · 1h 30m walk away

   Covered, somewhere warm, until doubled and slack enough that a finger pressed in leaves a dent that fills back only slowly. The oven goes on at maximum for the last twenty minutes with the tray inside it.

3. finish · 3m

   The sauce is passata, salt and a thread of oil. Nothing cooked and nothing else in it — a margherita has three flavours and cooking the tomato takes one of them away.

4. chop · 9m

   Mozzarella torn and left on kitchen paper to drain, which is the whole defence against a swamped middle. Dough halved and each piece pushed out from the centre with the fingertips on a floured board, the outer inch left untouched so it puffs into a rim.

5. roast · 14m

   Sauce spread thin, cheese scattered, and slid onto the screaming tray. Eight to ten minutes at the top of the oven, until the rim is blistered and there are dark spots on the underside.

6. finish · 2m

   Basil torn over as it comes out — put on before, it goes black — and a thread of oil.