How to Cook Authentic Italian Pizza

My first exposure to pizza was at 1:00 in the morning when I was child.

My sister and her friends had invaded our kitchen with Jeno’s Pizza – in a box.

They’d never had pizza either but decided it was time to venture into the culinary world.

We lived in a very small town, in an area of small towns, in Midwest farm country. Pizzas were new to us.

Jeno’s Pizza soon became a new, midnight tradition for my sister and her friends. It wasn’t long before the local pubs were serving frozen pizzas along with the beer. The rest, as they say, is history.

I do not now, nor have I ever, lived in a place that had pizza delivery service…. When we want pizza, which is often, I make it…. sometimes from scratch, sometimes using a purchased crust (very good ones here in France).

We tend to have it the Italian way: a few excellent toppings on a fresh sauce (or just sliced tomatoes) rather than a ‘loaded’ pizza.

What I don’t have is a proper pizza oven.

Hmmmm….. Christmas?

3 Things You Will Need To Cook An Authentic Italian Pizza

If you’ve ever been to Italy before, you will understand how different an authentic Italian pizza tastes compared to the pizzas you may have had. There are ways you can recapture this feeling at home, allowing you to cook an authentic Italian pizza. There are some things you will need, which we will cover below.

High-Quality Ingredients

Firstly, no authentic Italian pizza will be able to be made without high-quality ingredients. You can pre-purchase fresh tomato sauce, but it will be more authentic for you to create your own pizza sauce using fresh tomatoes.

You should also try to make your own pizza dough. The core ingredients you will need to make your own pizza dough are flour, water, yeast, and salt. There are different ways you can prepare this dough, depending on how thick or thin you want the dough and the eventual pizza.

You should also consider if you want a stuffed crust or not. If this is the case, you may decide you need some different ingredients to be stuffed and prepared. Finally, you will have to think further about what toppings you want for your pizza. You will most likely have cheese, but you may also want different vegetables or meats.

Cooking Equipment

Once you have sourced all of your ingredients and have a place where you can cook, you will need to ensure that you have all the cooking equipment you need. For many, this could come in a few different forms.

There are plenty of different ways to cook a pizza. For example, you could cook it in a traditional oven, an outdoor portable oven, a grill, an open fire, and even a microwave. You may have what you need now for cooking, or you may need to look into more high-end equipment.

You may need better cooking equipment and ovens designed for cooking pizzas. This will help you with cooking more authentic, high-quality Italian pizzas. Your stomach, and your guests, will thank you for it.

You can purchase a high-quality pizza oven from Ooni. Their range of outdoor pizza ovens could be exactly what your backyard needs to create an authentic cooking experience. This pizza oven makes cooking pizza a simple process, and you will find that you can cook pizzas very quickly.

The Right Tools

Once your pizza is cooked, you will want to ensure you have sharp utensils. Imagine you have cooked a perfect Italian pizza to butcher it while slicing due to blunt tools or lack of tools. That would be incredibly disappointing, so you should ensure you have the right tools.

There are plenty of useful pizza tools that you can make use of. These tools could come in the form of a pizza cutter or a pizza scizza. A scizza is a type of specialized scissors that are designed for pizzas. They can slide under the crust and cut with ease.

You may also need some tools that help you with creating the pizza. For example, you could make use of a ladle that helps you spread your sauce evenly across the dough before you cook. You may also want to use some scales, a grater, and even a blender.