Thin-Crust Neapolitan Pizza

crispy thin crust pizza with tomato sauce and mozzarella

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Everyone likes pizza, right? I’m a big fan of the Thin-Crust Neapolitan Pizza (and thick one…), perhaps it’s the crunchiness or the fact that the thin pizza is not heavy as the thick one… so I can eat more.

The dough is the most important part in any pizza so it is thin-crust Neapolitan Pizza dough that we need to focus our efforts and patience on.

Thin-Crust Neapolitan Pizza dough

I explained in details the strong points of the thin crust dough on previous posts, it is not a 30 minutes dough that you mix, proof for 10 minutes and send to the oven.

If we’ll do that we will not let the dough a chance to form the gluten connections, it needs in order to reach the appropriate flexibility and we will end up with a dense crust that resemble a cracker more than it does a bread.

Thin-Crust Neapolitan Pizza is from the bread family and as such, deserves the patience we give our breads, else it will have a fast bread texture like Naan or pancakes, we don’t want that, we want our pizza airy full of bubbles and light.

The sauce

I like thick texture tomato sauce or even scattered canned tomatoes for the thin-Crust pizza, I brush it with a thin layer of sauce, we can’t risk that heavy sauce will make the dough soggy, so little sauce will help the pizza be super crusty.

Sometime I don’t use sauce at all, making it “Italian style” Pizza, just add the mozzarella and favorite topping giving the dough the center stage.

Baking time

In order to get the best crust, we need high temperature, we can’t reach 500°c/1000°F in our home oven, these temperatures can be reached only in a designated wood or gas professional ovens, and this will produce with the best results, however there are ways for home bakers to adapt.

First thing we do is setting our oven to the highest mark, usually 250°c/500°F, keeping the oven in this temperature for at least 30 minutes.

In order to reach a crispy, bit burn crust we need for the dough to come with direct contact with heat, best way is to set a baking stone in the oven and leave it there for 30-60 minutes for it to gain heat.

If you don’t have a baking stone you can slide the baking pan on the bottom part of the oven, not on the bottom rack but really on the bottom of the oven, on the heating itself. Bake on the bottom of the oven for about 5 minutes and then lift the baking pan to the middle rack and continue baking, this will give the optimum results when there is no baking stone.