Homemade Pizza Dough Recipe: The Round Pizza We Stretch by Hand in Rome

Every pizza class starts the same way: somebody looks along the bench at Piazza Margana 22 for the rolling pin. There isn't one. The dough gets opened with fingertips, and the puffed rim that comes out of the oven is the whole point of the exercise.

This is our homemade pizza dough recipe, the round pizza we stretch by hand in class, written with the numbers we use every week. Five ingredients, one of them in a quantity that looks like a typo: 00 flour with the right strength, water at 25 °C, fresh yeast, salt, and a spoon of olive oil. Hydration at 63%. Then time, which does most of the work: six hours in a warm kitchen or a night in the fridge. Margherita on top, because it shows every fault in the dough.

Four pizzas, four balls of about 250 g, one per person. The dough alone weighs just over a kilo.

• 600 g of 00 pizza flour, 150 g per person, with a W of 260-300
• 380 ml of water, 95 ml per person, at about 25 °C
• 16 g of fine salt, 4 g per person, mixed into the flour
• 4 g of fresh yeast, 1 g per person, for the six-hour rise; 2 g in total, half a gram each, if the dough sleeps in the fridge
• 12 g of extra virgin olive oil, 3 g per person, plus a teaspoon per pizza at the end
• 400 g of tinned peeled tomatoes, 100 g per pizza, crushed by hand with a pinch of salt
• 400 g of fior di latte, 100 g per pizza, cut into strips and drained for 2 hours
• 40 g of grated grana or parmigiano, 10 g per pizza
• 8 basil leaves, 2 per pizza, added after the bake

Weigh the salt and the yeast on a scale that reads single grams. Two grams of yeast is a pea-sized crumb; guessed by eye it turns into six, and the dough tastes of it.

The dough has to hold gas for six hours, or for a day and a half, without tearing. Weak flour can't: its gluten goes slack after two or three hours, the balls flatten into puddles and the disc rips when you lift it. So we ask for a 00 milled for pizza with a W between 260 and 300. W is the strength index printed on Italian bags, and it tells you how long the dough can wait.

Outside Italy hardly anyone prints the W, so read the protein instead. Bread flour with 11.5 to 12.5% protein is the closest match. All-purpose is too weak for a long rise, and a very strong flour above 13.5% gives a rim you chew rather than tear. The 63% hydration assumes flour in that range; with anything weaker, hold back 20 ml of water.

The zeroes say how finely the flour is milled, not how strong it is.

Four grams of fresh yeast for 600 g of flour. Guests read that and assume a digit is missing. A dough with too much yeast rises fast, smells of beer and bakes flat in flavor. Slow is the whole idea: the enzymes in the flour turn starch into sugars, the sugars brown the rim, and none of that happens in a dough that's rushed.

Fresh yeast sits in 25 g cubes in every Italian supermarket. If active dry is all you can find, use a third of the weight, 1.3 g instead of 4 and a scant 0.7 g instead of 2, dissolved in the water first. Instant yeast goes straight into the flour at the same weight.

Water at about 25 °C, not warm; warm water speeds the yeast up, and speed is what we're avoiding. Mix the salt through the flour before it meets the liquid; salt sitting directly on yeast slows it down.

Both routes work.

The short route, 4 g of yeast. The kneaded ball sits covered at 26-28 °C for about 4 hours, until it has doubled and the surface shows its first bubbles. An oven switched off with the light on gives roughly that temperature. Then four balls, and another 2 hours under a cloth. Six hours from the scale to the stone.

The long route, 2 g of yeast. One hour at room temperature, then 24 hours in the fridge in a sealed box, up to 48 if that suits your week. Cold slows the yeast almost to a stop while the enzymes keep working, so the dough gains flavor without gaining gas. It comes out tight and needs 2 to 3 hours at room temperature before you divide it.

If you have the day, take the long route. Fridge dough opens more easily, blisters better and tastes of wheat instead of yeast.

The yeast goes into the 380 ml of water first and gets stirred until it's gone. The flour, with the salt already through it, goes in a third at a time and is worked with one hand until there's no dry patch left; the 12 g of oil are the last thing in, kneaded until the dough stops feeling greasy. What you have at this point is a shaggy, sticky mass that looks like too much water. It isn't, and it doesn't want more flour.

Then 15 minutes on the bare board. The rhythm is push, fold, turn, and the dough tells you when it's done: at around 10 minutes it stops sticking and starts coming off the wood on its own, at 15 the surface turns smooth and a piece pulled slowly between your fingers thins into a film you can read a newspaper through. Before that, it tears. Ball it with the seam underneath, cover it, and start whichever clock you chose.

Once it has risen, it gets divided. Four pieces of about 250 g, cut with the scraper and weighed, because a 220 g ball and a 280 g ball won't bake in the same time. To shape each one, gather the edges into the middle, turn it over and roll it under a cupped hand until the seam closes and the skin is tight. Ten centimeters apart on a floured tray, covered, for 2 hours. When the balls have relaxed into soft domes and a fingertip dent comes back only halfway, they're ready. If the dent springs straight back, they need longer.

The rim exists because you never touch it. A rolling pin flattens the whole disc, border included, and pushes out the gas the yeast spent six hours making; what comes out of the oven is a cracker with tomato on it.

So: a ball dropped in flour, turned over, set on the board. Fingertips press down in the middle and work outwards, and they stop 2 cm short of the edge. That untouched band is where the gas migrates, and it becomes the rim. Quarter turn, press again, flip, press again. When the disc is wider than your hand, lift it onto the backs of both hands and let its own weight do the rest while you turn it slowly. Stop at about 28 cm across, with the middle around 3 mm thick.

If the disc shrinks back the moment you let go, don't fight it. The gluten is still tense, either because the ball came out of the fridge too recently or because the second rise was cut short. Forcing it tears the middle. Cover it, wait ten minutes, try again; it opens on its own.

The first ball is always lopsided. The second is fine.

The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana bakes at 430-480 °C, where a pizza is done in 60 to 90 seconds. Its dough is 1.6 to 1.8 kg of flour per liter of water, 40 to 60 g of salt, between 0.1 and 3 g of fresh yeast, balls of 200 to 280 g, and no oil. We keep the salt, the ball weight and the long rise, add the oil and a little more water, and change the oven, because nobody has 450 °C at home.

At 250 °C the disc sits on the stone for 5 to 7 minutes instead of one, so it goes in thinner and carries less. The stone, or an upturned heavy tray, goes on the upper rack 40 minutes before the first disc, while the balls finish their rest. Then 100 g of tomato spread with the back of a spoon from the center out, stopping at the rim. 10 g of grana. 100 g of drained mozzarella. Any more liquid and the center never sets.

Mozzarella goes on straight away if your oven holds its heat, halfway through if it's slow. Basil and a teaspoon of oil after the bake, never before, or the leaves burn black. It's done when the bottom shows brown spots, the rim has blistered and the cheese has melted without pooling. The next ball is opened while the first is being eaten.

Bench flour by the handful. Sticky hands send people to the bag, and a dough that has soaked up an extra fistful of flour is a different dough, tighter and drier. Flour the ball to open it, not the board while kneading. That's what the scraper is for.

Mozzarella straight from the packet. The cause of the wet white circle in the middle of a margherita, nine times out of ten. Two hours in a colander, no exceptions.

Opening the oven door. Every look costs the stone heat it can't win back before the pizza finishes. Watch through the glass and open once, when the rim has color.

Tomato that has been cooked. Tinned tomatoes already carry the water and acidity a seven-minute bake needs; cooked first, they dry to a skin. Passata will do in a pinch, without the salt.

The wrong mozzarella. Buffalo is wetter than fior di latte; if you must, add it halfway through the bake. The low-moisture block sold abroad behaves well at home. Pre-grated mozzarella dusted with starch never does.

In our kitchen at Piazza Margana 22, in the center of Rome. The pizza making class with gelato runs about two and a half hours: you make the dough from scratch, stretch it with your fingertips, choose your own toppings and bake it, then close the session by making Italian gelato and sit down to eat what you cooked, with wine, soft drinks and espresso on the table. The menu is vegetarian friendly and children knead alongside the adults. A private version of the same class exists for groups who want the kitchen to themselves.

The gelato half of the class has its own pages, pistachio gelato and hazelnut gelato; everything else we run is on the cooking classes page.

Bring your hands, not a rolling pin. We'd only take it away.