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Dough Ingredients
- 1000g Tipo 00 flour (W 260–270, 12.5–13.5% protein)
- 590g water
- 31g fine sea salt
- 1.8g fresh brewer's yeast
Instructions
- Weigh everything. The yeast in particular is under two grams in a kilo of flour, and eyeballing it is the single fastest way to turn a twelve-hour dough into a four-hour one. Need one? Digital kitchen scale (1 g resolution)
- Dissolve the salt fully in the water. This is the order the specification gives, and it matters: salt in first, yeast later, so the two never meet at full concentration.
- Add about 10% of the flour and mix to a loose slurry.
- Crumble in the yeast and mix it through.
- Add the remaining flour gradually, mixing until it comes together into a single mass.
- Knead for 10–20 minutes until the dough is smooth, slack, and satiny. It should be noticeably softer than a bread dough.
- Cover and rest as a single mass — the puntata — for about 2 hours at room temperature.
- Divide and ball by hand. The traditional motion is the same one used to pinch mozzarella, sealing the seam underneath as you go.
- Set the balls in a covered box with room to spread and leave them for the appretto: 6–10 hours more at room temperature, for 8–12 hours total. Cooler kitchen, longer wait.
- Open each ball by hand from the centre outward, leaving the outer 1–2 cm untouched so it can inflate into the cornicione. Never a rolling pin — it drives out the gas that makes the rim. Need one? Aluminium pizza peel, 12 × 14 in, with rocker cutter
- Bake at 430–480°C for 60–90 seconds, turning once.
This is the classic Neapolitan recipe, built to the standard set by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana — the body that certifies whether a pizzeria may call its pizza verace. Their formula is written per litre of water, which is how a pizzeria thinks and not how anyone bakes at home, so I’ve put it on a kilo of flour and portioned it into six balls.
It’s the reference point everything else here departs from, and it’s worth having written down plainly, because almost every “authentic Neapolitan” recipe online is quietly not.
Where the numbers come from
The standard is written per litre of water, not per kilo of flour:
1 litre water · 50–55 g sea salt · 3 g fresh brewer’s yeast · 1.6–1.8 kg Tipo 00 or Tipo 0 flour
Each of those is a range, so a recipe has to choose. I’ve taken 1.7 kg of flour — the midpoint — which lands everything comfortably inside the limits:
| Percentage of flour | |
|---|---|
| Water | 55–62% (59% here) |
| Salt | 2.8–3.4% (3.1% here) |
| Fresh yeast | 0.006–0.18% (0.18% here) |
| Oil, sugar, fat | none permitted |
Two things stand out against a modern home recipe. The salt is high — over 3%, where most pizza doughs sit near 2%. And the yeast is almost nothing: under two grams in a kilo of flour, roughly an eighth of what a same-day dough uses. Those two facts are the same fact. Salt slows fermentation and a tiny yeast population ferments slowly on its own, and the eight to twenty-four hours that buys is where the flavour comes from. There is no oil to soften anything and no sugar to help it brown, because at 430–480°C nothing needs help.
The part most recipes leave out
The standard is not only a formula. It also requires a wood-fired oven at 430–480°C, a bake of 60–90 seconds, and a base opened entirely by hand. A dough mixed to this formula and baked at 250°C in a domestic oven is not a Neapolitan pizza that came out slightly wrong — it’s a different thing. Low, slow heat dries out a 59% dough long before it colours, and with no oil and no sugar in the formula there’s nothing to rescue it.
So be honest about your oven before choosing this recipe:
- Wood-fired, or a gas oven that genuinely hits 450°C+ — this is the one.
- A domestic oven at 250°C — you’ll get a better pizza from a formula built for that heat. More hydration, some oil, longer bake.
- Somewhere in between, which is where most high-heat home ovens land. My version is this formula with the corners knocked off: a little oil for tenderness, less salt and more yeast so it’s ready the same afternoon, and smaller balls.
Scale it
Loaded into the pizza dough calculator as the True Neapolitan (AVPN) preset. Load it and Emmanuel’s Neapolitan one after the other to see exactly which four numbers move, and by how much.
Equipment
What each of these actually changes about the result. Links go to Amazon and earn this site a commission at no cost to you — more on that here.
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A cup of flour can vary by 20% depending on how it was scooped, which is enough to move a dough from 72% to 62% hydration. Weighing is the single change that makes bread recipes repeatable.
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Stainless takes a warm water bath to hold dough temperature and goes in the fridge without cracking. The set nests, which matters more than it sounds like when three recipes need four bowls.
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Lets you move and divide slack dough without deflating it, and cleans a floured counter in one pass. Cheap enough that there is no reason to improvise with a spatula.
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The failure a lid prevents is skinning: a ball left uncovered dries at the surface, and a dried surface tears at the rim instead of opening into one. Shallow and flat-bottomed matters too — balls need room to spread sideways without touching, and a deep bowl makes them climb each other instead.
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A thin metal leading edge slides under a dressed pizza without dragging the toppings off with it, which is the entire job. Flour the peel rather than the dough and give it a shake before you commit — a base that has stuck to the peel will not unstick over a 450°C oven. The handle folds flat, which matters more than it sounds like when the thing is fourteen inches wide.
Notes
- Total dough is 1,623 g, which is six balls of 270 g. The standard allows 200–280 g, giving a pizza of 22–35 cm — I've gone to the upper end because a bigger ball is more forgiving to open by hand.
- Yeast is 0.18% of flour, the top of the permitted range (0.1–3 g of fresh yeast per litre of water). I use the maximum because it puts the rise at 8–12 hours rather than 24. Use less in a warm kitchen or if you want to stretch it overnight. If your scale only reads whole grams, 2 g is within tolerance.
- Fresh yeast is what the standard calls for. If you only have dry, use roughly 0.6g instant or 0.75g active dried in place of the 1.8g fresh.
- Hydration is 59%, mid-range of the permitted 55–62%. Wetter is harder to launch and does not obviously bake better at these temperatures.
- No oil and no sugar. Not an omission — the standard does not permit them, and at 430–480°C nothing needs the help.
- The 430–480°C bake is the part a domestic oven cannot reach. Read the oven note before deciding this is the recipe you want.