Margherita Pizza

On the flour: if you can't get a dedicated "strong" bread flour, look for one with roughly 12–13% protein on the packet — that's the number that matters, not the brand. Plain flour alone won't ruin the pizza, but the crust will be flatter and less chewy, more biscuit than bread. You're feeding two people here, and 540g of combined flour with 330ml water sits at a hydration around 61% — manageable by hand, nothing like the wet, slappy doughs that need a stand mixer. That's deliberate: this dough is meant to be kneadable on a kitchen worktop, not a lab exercise.

The yeast dissolved into water before it meets flour isn't a ritual, it's distribution — yeast dropped dry into a dry mix clumps and gives you patchy rising, pale spots where nothing happened. 5g for 540g flour is a small, slow amount, which is exactly why you need the full two hours: slow fermentation is what gives you flavour, not just volume. Rush it with more yeast or a warmer spot and you get a dough that rises fast but tastes of nothing — bread without patience tastes like cardboard with air in it.

Salt and oil go in after the initial mix, not before, because salt in direct contact with raw yeast before gluten has started forming can slow fermentation right down — you're not poisoning it, but you're handicapping it for no reason. The oil (any neutral olive oil — nothing peppery or grassy, you don't want it arguing with the tomato later) softens the crumb and helps the dough stay extensible rather than tight.

On the sauce: passata, not chopped tinned tomatoes, because you want a sauce that spreads thin and even without lumps that burn under a hot tin. Salt and oregano go in before baking, not after — oregano cooked briefly loses its raw, medicinal harshness and turns savoury; added raw at the end it tastes like the inside of a spice jar.

Fior di latte, not buffalo mozzarella, is the right call for an oven that runs this hot for this long: buffalo mozzarella holds far more water and will flood your base, soaking straight through the crust you worked two and a half hours to build. If you can't find fior di latte, a low-moisture mozzarella block, grated or torn, is a closer substitute than anything "buffalo" on the label. Cut it small, as the recipe says, and the reason is simple heat physics — small pieces melt and set in the 7 minutes you've got, whole slices just go gluey on the outside and cold in the middle.

Basil goes on raw, after the second bake, because basil cooked is basil wasted — the volatile oils that smell like basil evaporate the moment they meet real heat, and what's left is a limp green leaf with none of the scent that made you buy it fresh in the first place. This isn't a tradition to be defensive about; it's just that cooked basil and no basil taste roughly the same, so why bother.

For two people, two bases from this dough is generous without being silly — British supermarket pizza trays tend to run smaller than you think, so don't be afraid to stretch the dough right to the rim by hand rather than reaching for a rolling pin. A rolling pin pushes all the air you spent two hours building straight back out of the dough; your knuckles and fingertips, working from the centre out, leave the air pockets at the edge alone, which is where your crust puffs up into that uneven, blistered rim everyone actually wants.