How To Make Neapolitan Pizza Dough

Water

Salt

Yeast

Flour 

When calculating your own recipe, it’s best to stick to the percentages below. These are the ratios used by the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, which safeguards the original recipe for Neapolitan dough.

100% Flour

65% Water

3% Salt

0.2% Fresh yeast

Wow wow wow! What if you don’t like calculating? No worries, just check out my:

Pizza dough calculator

All you have to do is select what kind of pizza you want to make – Neapolitan, in this case –, how big you want your pizza to be and how many you will make. Now just press calculate and BOOM, you’ll have your very own custom pizza recipe. Let’s get started!

Mixing

First, take 2 bowls and add the amount of flour specified by the calculator to one of them. Fill the second bowl with the amount of water the calculator has told you to use. 

Add your salt, stirring it into the water until it’s completely dissolved.

Now it’s time to dissolve your yeast in the water, but there’s one big problem. Yeast doesn’t like salty water, as the salt will damage the yeast, which means your dough won’t rise the way it’s supposed to.

So, what you do is you take some of the flour in bowl number one (about 10%) and mix it into your salty water. You don’t have to be very accurate, but it is a very important step, because the flour will protect the yeast against the salt, allowing it to work properly.

Ok. When you’ve stirred the salt and 10% of the flour into your water, you can add your fresh yeast. If you don’t have fresh yeast, you can use dry yeast, but make sure to use half of the amount recommended by the calculator. (yes, it’s a tiny amount, but trust me, it works!) After you’ve stirred the yeast into the salty, floury water, you can add the rest of the flour.

Now put the remaining flour in the bowl and mix with a spoon or your fingertips. During this stage, the dough will feel very dry and flaky.

When everything has been mixed together, you can start kneading the dough in the bowl. Continue until all the water and flour have been incorporated into a dough. During this stage, the dough will start to feel wet and sticky.

Kneading

You can now take the dough out of the bowl and start kneading the (probably very sticky) dough on your worktop. Just stay calm and keep on kneading. You’re now busy forming the gluten and the consistency of the dough will change after you’ve kneaded it for about 10 to 20 min. 

When the dough has taken on an even, soft and elastic consistency, you can start shaping it into a big ball.

Check out our tutorial on how to make dough balls to find out more 

Rise 1

Get a clean bowl and brush it with a thin layer of oil. Put your dough in the bowl and cover with cling film or a damp towel, before letting the dough rest for about 2 hours.

After 2 hours have passed, you can portion the dough into balls. Check out our tutorial on how to make dough balls for more info (link coming soon).

Rise 2

When you’re done portioning the balls, place them on a baking tray or pizza dough tray coated with a little bit of oil or flour and cover them with cling film or a lid. Let the dough rise for at least 4 hours (6 hours is better!) at room temperature.

Yesss! You’ve made your own pizza dough. Now it’s time to make pizzzaaasss!

If you’d like to make an even better, tastier dough, check out the section on

Cold Fermenting