Everybody loves pizza, but not everyone knows how easy is to make one!
Since it's Friday I decided to share with you my proven recipe for awesome pizza so you have a chance to do it during the weekend.

Ingredients

The amount provided is perfectly enough for average size pies (Ø 35cm/14").

Pizza dough:

• 500 g of type 00 flour (I personally recommend this one)
• 300 ml of warm water
• 12.5 g of salt
• a tiny ball of fresh yeast

Toppings:

• tomato sauce (just used whole tomatoes, smash them, add some salt and basil leaves and cook for a while, San Marzano tomatoes are the best!)
• mozzarella cheese (if you have access to Mozzarella di Bufala that's great, if not use regular one)
• olive oil
• fresh basil leaves

Equipment:

• a big plastic box
• a pizza stone
• a pizza shovel (a short wooden one is perfectly enough; they are often being included to a pizza stone)

Preparing the dough

1. Use your hands to mix flour with salt.
2. Dissolve yeast in the water, then add the mixture into the flour.
3. Knead the dough (here is a good tutorial)
4. When the dough is ready put it into a bowl, make a cross cut (this will make the dough rise sideways instead of going up) and wrap the bowl with a plastic kitchen foil and let it rest ... for 24h!

We are using a very low amount of yeast so long resting time will allow them to do their job & the pizza will remain easily digested.

After 24h take out the dough and cut it into three even pieces, make three dough balls (here is a video showing how), then let them rest for another 2-3 hours in a plastic box sprinkled with flour.

The baking process

Setup

I am using the baking stone as this give the best results, but you can use a pizza pan as well.

1. Set up the oven to the highest temperature available and preheat the pizza stone. My oven has the limit of 250C in regular mode & 300C in grill mode so I am heating it up to 250C then switching to grill mode to get the highest temperature (give the stone at least 30 min to heat up).

Streching the dough

Let's make that pizza! Let's take out the dough ball from the plastic box. Well, technically it's not a ball now (at least it should be), anyway we need to stretch it a bit more (once again a video showing how, sorry but it really hard for me to explain the technique in words).

We have our dough stretched & ready. Let's take a pizza shovel, sprinkle it with flour so the dough doesn't stick to it, and put the pie on it. Put a bit of olive oil in the middle, tomato sauce (too much is not good as it will make pizza extra moist) and spread it over the whole pie and let get ready for some baking!

Wait ... where are the toppings? The trick is that in the professional pizza ovens reaches the temperature around 500C which make the baking process extra short (the dough is well baked, but the cheese is not totally melted.

So I figured out that if bake the dough with tomato sauce first for ~2 minutes, then take it out, add the mozzarella, basil leaves and bake for another minute or two, I achieve the best results. This way make the dough well baked and the mozzarella cheese stays nice and white. Now all you have to do is adding some basil leaves

EXTRA TIP: When sliding a dough from the shovel on the baking stone you can gently blow some air under the pie, this will make pizza slide of the shovel really smooth.

Et voila! Our crispy, cheeseee, delicious pie!