How To Make A Margherita Pizza

Today, I'm going to show you how to make Pizza Margherita. We've got, for the base, 500 grams of double zero flour, 10 grams of fresh yeast, but you could use 7 grams, one sachet of dried yeast. I've got two heaped teaspoons of salt, a 120 ml of water, 200 ml of beer and the flour as I've said.

For the topping, I'm going to be using 400 grams, so that's one can of plum tomatoes. I've got a heaped teaspoon of oregano, a heaped teaspoon of salt and some basil leaves and, to finish, some balls of mozzarella. So to make the dough, to begin with, what I'm going to do is melt the yeast into the water.

And you can do this with your fingers just to make sure that all the little lumps of yeast are really well combined into it. If you're using dried yeast, what you do is scatter the dried yeast straight into the flour as long as it's the easy blend version of it. So, I'm going to put the salt in there now, make sure my yeast is really, really well mixed up and there aren't any little lumps clinging to the bottom here.

So I can pour that straight in. I'm just going to mix up the salt a little bit first, then I can pour that straight in and measure out 200 ml of the beer. Beer gives it a really nice flavour and it also helps activate the yeast quite well.

So I'm just making sure I've got enough in there. So, all the liquid into place and then using a dough scraper, or your hands if you don't have a dough scraper, just mix the dough together. If you feel it's a little bit dry, you can always add a little bit more of either water or beer.

And all the alcohol in the beer is cooked out, so don't worry about giving it to your children. Right, so now, I'm going to get my hand in there, just one hand at the moment so you don't get covered in dough. And now, I'm going to knead it.

So, you can see that it doesn't have much elasticity at the moment, but you're going to develop that by the kneading. So what I'm going to do is stretch out the dough, fold it to trap the air in there and turn it. Right, so once it springs back to the touch, let's have a look.

There we are, you can see it springing back to the touch. So, I know that I've kneaded it enough. So, it's probably been around seven to ten minutes.

But that is really going for it. So I've got my lovely, soft ball of dough. I'm now going to cut it into four.

If you want to be accurate, you could weigh these on a digital scale so that you know that each ball of dough is the same and that way, everyone gets the same size of pizza because this makes four pizza margheritas. I'm now going to make them into little balls, so if you, say I've got a triangle here, I'm going to fold in the edges here. So I've almost got my little dough ball and then just shave them like this, moving my hands around them, so that all the little crevices get tucked into the bottom and you get this nice even topping here.

Now, what we're going to do is rub a little bit of oil over the surface just so that they don't get a crust on them. So I'm going to leave them for maybe about an hour, really until they've doubled in volume and I can see that they are nice and puffy and ready. So, to make the pizza topping, I've got some tinned tomatoes here.

I'm just going to mash them up using a potato masher, into here, I'm going to put the oregano just over a heaped teaspoon of oregano and a heaped teaspoon of salt as well. The pizza topping should have a lot of flavour to it. That's a couple of tablespoons of olive oil going in there as well.

So, let's see how the pizza is done. Wow! That has risen up really well. So, you can see they have doubled in volume, doubled in size and now what we are going to do is roll them out.

Plenty of flour now. I'm rolling them out with a rolling pin, and put the pizza onto the board. And when you're doing this, just make sure that your pizza is going to move around on the board all the time.

So, now, for the topping, it's probably a couple of tab