Neapolitan pizza is the round, soft-centered pizza of Naples: a puffy, leopard-spotted rim, a thin middle you eat with a knife and fork, tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and not much else. It’s also the one pizza with a formal rulebook, which makes it easy to assume that making it at home means following the rules. In a home oven it mostly means the opposite.
What the rules assume
The Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana (AVPN) and the Italian government registered Neapolitan pizza with the European Union as a Traditional Specialty Guaranteed. As Ken Forkish summarizes the rules, the dough is just flour, water, salt and yeast in defined ratios, mixed for 20 minutes, fermented for 2 hours, divided by hand into balls, fermented again for 4 to 6 hours, and baked in an oven averaging 905°F (485°C). The water is 55 to 59% of the flour weight, and the dough balls weigh 180 to 250 g. The full standard is in Inside the AVPN standard.
Two things are worth knowing before you take the rulebook as gospel:
- Naples doesn’t follow it strictly either. Modernist Pizza calls the AVPN’s definition “more aspirational than actual” and says it isn’t clear that any major pizzeria in Naples strictly follows the full rules. The book describes the dough Ciro Salvo shared with the authors at 50 Kalò as 70% water with salt upward of 3%, fermented 20 to 24 hours. Those are the proportions the book reported in 2021, not a freshly checked formula or a complete recipe.
- The numbers are built for the oven. A 55 to 59% dough, the range Forkish gives for the rules, is right for a 60-second bake at 905°F. (The AVPN’s current public recipe works out to about 56 to 63%: 1 liter of water for 1.6 to 1.8 kg of flour.) Forkish’s point is that the same dough in a 550°F home oven bakes into a stiff, dry, crisp crust, nothing like the tender pizza you eat with a knife and fork in Naples.
Why a home oven needs a different dough
A crust loses moisture the whole time it’s in the oven. Seven or eight minutes at 550°F takes far more water out of the dough than 60 seconds at 905°F, so a dough made to Naples’ numbers dries out before it’s done. Forkish’s fix is to add water: his Neapolitan-style home recipes run at about 70% hydration, which stays soft in the middle over a 7-minute bake, though the rim comes out crisper than in Naples.
The same logic runs the other way. Forkish warns that a dough above 70% hydration fails at 905°F, because the base doesn’t set fast enough to slide a peel under it and turn the pizza. Modernist Pizza’s hydration tests on its own master Neapolitan dough found limits at both ends: at 55% it was stiff and hard to shape, and it could only take so much more water before it lost its elasticity. That’s a limit for one formula, not a rule: a separate dough the authors made with pregelatinized flour took considerably more water and still handled like the master.
So there’s no single correct hydration. There’s a right one for your oven.
Match the dough to your oven
These are the Pizza Planner’s Neapolitan-style settings, all with 3% salt. Home-oven temperatures are the dial setting; portable-oven temperatures are an infrared reading of the baking stone.
| Oven | Water | Temperature | Bake | Preheat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home oven with a steel or stone | 70% | 500–550°F (260–288°C) setting | 6–10 min | 45–60 min |
| Outdoor gas, wood or pellet pizza oven | 60% | 750–850°F (400–450°C) stone | 1–2 min | 25–40 min |
| Breville Pizzaiolo | 60% | Wood Fired preset | 2–3 min (our adaptation) | 10–20 min, until AT TEMP |
The Planner’s 60% for portable ovens follows Ooni’s published Classic Pizza Dough, which is one maker’s formula rather than a rule for every portable oven.
For the Pizzaiolo, use the Wood Fired preset. Breville’s manual recommends 2 minutes on it, and says preheating takes 10 to 20 minutes depending on the preset: wait until the AT TEMP light stays on, and again before each later pizza. The Planner’s 700–750°F (370–400°C) deck figure comes from the manual’s separate manual-mode table, where Neapolitan is also 2 minutes, and its 2–3 minute window is our adaptation, not Breville’s published range. Start checking at about 2 minutes. If your oven’s maker gives different preheat or temperature instructions, follow the maker.
Flour: 00 or bread flour
You don’t need one particular flour. Italian 00 is the closer match to the official specification, and Forkish’s home recipes ask for white flour, ideally 00. Bread flour also makes good Neapolitan-style pizza, especially in a home oven, with a slightly chewier crust. Note that “00” isn’t a measure of fineness or strength: Modernist Pizza explains that the Italian grades are set by ash content, which tracks how refined the flour is. Check the protein figure if you’re fermenting for a day or more. The details are in can you use bread flour for Neapolitan pizza and the flour guide.
The dough to use
For a home oven, start with a cold-fermented 70% dough. Forkish’s 24- to 48-hour dough is a good first choice: 500 g flour, 350 g water, 13 g salt and 1.5 g instant yeast, a 2-hour rise, then balls in the fridge until the next evening. It’s written out step by step in the 24- to 48-hour dough recipe, and the full pizza is in the home-oven Margherita.
Ball size. The Planner uses 250 g for a 12-inch pizza, the top of the AVPN’s 180 to 250 g range. Forkish divides his doughs into three balls of 260 to 285 g, noting that some well-known Naples pizzerias, like Starita, use 260 to 270 g, which suits home baking. Either is fine; the heavier ball gives a slightly thicker base.
The home-oven bake
Forkish’s method gets the most out of a kitchen oven by using the broiler for top heat:
- Put a steel or stone on an upper rack, no more than 8 inches below the broiler, and preheat at 550°F (290°C). The Planner allows 45 to 60 minutes.
- Switch to the broiler 10 minutes before loading, then switch back to bake at 550°F as the pizza goes in.
- Bake with sauce only for about 4 minutes, until the rim starts to turn golden.
- Add the mozzarella and basil and bake 1 to 2 minutes more.
- Finish under the broiler for about 2 minutes, checking after 1, until the cheese has softly melted and the rim has a few spots of char.
Adding the cheese partway through stops it from liquefying over the longer bake, so it keeps the texture it has in Naples. That’s the idea behind the two-stage bake. Check that your oven allows the broiler to be used this way.
Shaping and toppings
Shape by hand. Press from the center outward and leave the outer inch alone so the gas stays in the rim; that’s what puffs into the cornicione. Neapolitan and New York pizzas are shaped by hand; a rolling pin is for thin Roman and bar pizzas. The stretching guide shows the technique.
Top lightly. The Neapolitan sauce is canned whole peeled tomatoes puréed with salt, uncooked. For a 12-inch Margherita, Forkish uses 60 to 80 g of sauce, 80 to 100 g of fresh mozzarella (fior di latte or bufala) in short strips, a little grated pecorino or Parmigiano and a few basil leaves. The Pizza Calculator starts a 12-inch Neapolitan-style pizza at 58 to 88 g of sauce and 73 to 109 g of cheese.
Basil, before or after? Both are right. Forkish notes that it’s traditional to bake the basil on the pizza, while Franco Pepe at Pepe in Grani adds it after baking.
If yours comes out crisper
That’s not a failure. Modernist Pizza found that outside Naples, virtually every Neapolitan-style pizzeria in Italy makes a browner, crisper version, which Italians call classico, and that most Italians prefer it. The AVPN has even campaigned on the idea that a pizza with a crunch isn’t authentic, a campaign the book calls absurd. A home-oven pizza will always be crisper than one from Naples. Forkish’s description of a good home result:
- 10 to 12 inches across when stretched.
- Dark brown, occasionally black, leopard spots underneath.
- A center that’s soft but fully baked, so a slice flops from rim to tip.
- A puffy rim with air bubbles inside and dark brown or black splotches.
- Cheese fully melted but not burned or liquefied.
If you want the soft, 90-second version, you need the heat: see the oven guide for portable ovens that reach it.
Sources
- Ken Forkish, The Elements of Pizza (2016): chapter 2, “Neapolitan Pizza” (the AVPN and TSG rules, 55 to 59% hydration, 70% for home ovens, desired results); chapter 3, “Match the Dough and Its Hydration to the Oven”; chapter 5 (shaping methods, dough-ball sizes); chapter 6, “24- to 48-Hour Pizza Dough”; chapter 7, “Pizza Margherita” and “Basic Tomato Sauce” (the home bake, topping amounts, basil, Starita’s ball size).
- Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, Modernist Pizza (2021), volume 1: page 130 (the AVPN definition), page 134 (Rest-of-Italy Neapolitan and the AVPN slogan), page 158 (Ciro Salvo, 50 Kalò), page 279 (Italian flour grades and ash content) and page 289 (Neapolitan hydration tests, pregelatinized flour).
- Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana: public Neapolitan pizza recipe (water and flour quantities). Checked October 14, 2026.
- Ooni, Classic Pizza Dough: 60% hydration for portable ovens. Checked October 14, 2026.
- Breville, Pizzaiolo BPZ820 instruction manual, pages 8–12: preheating and the AT TEMP light (page 8), the Wood Fired preset’s 2-minute time (page 9) and the manual-mode table (page 12). Checked October 14, 2026.
- Oven settings, dough-ball weights and topping ranges are from the site’s pizza engine; the Pizzaiolo’s 2–3 minute window is the engine’s adaptation.