How to Make Neapolitan-Style Pizza

By Daniel Gritzer

Time—not a 1,000-degree oven—is essential for these delicious, thin-crust pies.

Perfect Neapolitan Pizza Dough

Perfect Pizza Sauce

Summer Squash-and-Arugula Pizza with Fontina Cheese

Margherita Pizza with Tomato, Mozzarella and Basil

Sausage-and-Olive Pizza with Capers and Pecorino Sardo

If God created the universe in just one week, a pizza recipe that takes three days seems excessive. But the dough for a great crust—delicate and crisp on the outside, tender and elastic on the inside, with a subtle, complex tang—needs at least that long to proof (leaven with yeast). “With a long, slow rise, you can use a very small amount of yeast, which creates much more nuanced flavors,” says Thomas McNaughton, the chef and dough master at San Francisco’s Flour + Water, Salumeria and Central Kitchen. Using a lot of yeast speeds things up, but it also produces a tough, unpleasantly yeasty-tasting crust (as the F&W Test Kitchen discovered when we tried to compress McNaughton’s recipe into a single day, with terrible results). Here, McNaughton shares his dough recipe, his perfect tomato sauce and his topping ideas, like sausage with olives, capers and pecorino; and sliced squash with Fontina and arugula.