Italian homemade pizza: the 5 worst mistakes

I’m sure your Italian homemade pizza is certainly good, but perhaps it doesn’t remind you of the ones you saw or ate in your favorite Italian pizzeria.

What went wrong?

Here are the 5 most common mistakes in making authentic Italian pizza at home.

Before trying to make an authentic italian pizza at home, you should know what these mistakes are.

P.S. If you are looking for authentic Italian homemade pizza dough recipe read the related post. If instead you want to know more about the margherita pizza toppings click here!

1. Italian homemade pizza mistakes: the flour used

“A pizza-maker is known by the flour he or she keeps.”

What do you know about pizza flours?

Have you ever heard about “strength” or “elasticity“?

In a nutshell:

• the flour to be used has to have the right “strength,” because the dough for an authentic Italian homade pizza requires long leavening time.
• With the correct flour, the dough will also have the right “elasticity,” this will make it easier to stretch without tearing.

So it is clear that in order to achieve a perfect Italian homemade  pizza you must choose the right pizza flour! And doing this, means essentially, learning the meaning of the characteristics listed on the package-label.

To this purpose I created for you “The correct Flour is MAGICAL”, a simple guide to select the appropriate flour.

This will turn out to be really essential for the Italian homemade pizza, but not only, since every recipe wants its own flour!

I’m sure you have made at home some dishes which didn’t turn out to be up to par. It was probably the flour!

To learn more download the FREE guide!

2. Italian homemade pizza mistakes: too much yeast

Most people don’t know that in making Italian pizza only a small tad of yeast is necessary.

My recommendation is to use fresh yeast. However dry yeast is more commonly available throughout the world. It usually comes in packages of 7 gr. (1/4 oz). And usually, people use the entire content of the package to knead their pizza dough!

But this amount (7 gr. of dry yeast) is sufficient for at least 15 kg (almost 33 lb) of flour, did you know that? This is the equivalent of more than 100 pizzas!!!

You are not opening up a pizzeria!! Are you?

Even the Regulation (that establish the parameters to make a real Neapolitan pizza,) states that to knead 1800 gr. of flour (an amount to make 12 pizzas) you should use no more of 3 gr. of fresh yeast, equivalent to 0.84 gr. of dry yeast.

Honestly, an extremely small amount of yeast is needed! If you want to know the right amount of yeast to make a great pizza at home, go to my authentic Italian pizza dough recipe!

3.Italian homemade pizza mistakes: letting the dough leaven for too short a time

Should you ever decide to prepare a pizza to be eaten the same evening, it will not have enough leavening time to rise properly. Therefore, you will get a great NON, and I repeat, NON-Neapolitan pizza.

It must have at least 8 hours of leavening (don’t worry, it leavens on its own!) Also what will affect leavening is the room temperature. (Personally, I let the dough rise for about 20 hours.)

This is what makes the pizza even tastier and easier for you to digest.

If you are after a GREAT Italian homemade pizza, you’ll give it the leavening time that it needs!

4. Italian homemade pizza mistakes: stretching the pizza base way before it’s time to bake it!

If you stretch the pizza base and then you let it rise once again in the baking-pan, what will be obtained is a good pizza but it will be too thick. The authentic Neapolitan pizza should be very thin, no higher than 0.4 cm (0.16’’). In order to obtain this, you must stretch it and immediately bake it!

5. Italian homemade pizza mistakes: stretching your Italian homemade pizza dough with a rolling pin

Stretching pizza dough like a real pizza-chef, at the beginning, it may seem hard to accomplish, but it’s doable.

However, whatever you do, do not use the rolling pin (I’m sure you have seen someone doing this).

It’s not a step used to make authentic Italian pizza for a simple reason: by working the dough with a rolling pin causes the air bubbles (created during the leavening) to be crushed by the pressure you apply when trying to roll out your dough.

The result of this is a pizza with a flat and hard outer-crust.

Actually, the traditional method of stretching pizza by hand is less complicated than what you could possibly imagine. And it’s even more rewarding!

But let’s solve a problem at a time. Let’s start with the flour! (Because everything starts with this one ingredient!)

Download the guide! It’s FREE!