Roman Pizza al Taglio: The Most Underrated Home Pizza Style

In Rome, a lot of pizza is bought by the slice: rectangles cut from long pans or from strips of dough baked right on the oven floor, snipped to size with scissors, weighed and wrapped in paper. That’s pizza al taglio, “by the cut.” Forkish describes it as a light lunch or a snack, with plain bianca and tomato rossa as the classics and more creative toppings on the rest.

For a home cook it skips the hardest parts of round pizza: there’s no stretching to a circle and no launching off a peel. You stretch the dough to the edges of a pan and bake it there.

What defines it

Modernist Pizza sums up the style as a high-hydration dough baked in a pan, giving an open crumb and a slightly crispy bottom, designed to be baked ahead and reheated before serving. Two pizzaioli shaped the modern version:

• Angelo Iezzi began upgrading Rome’s slice pizza in the late 1980s, replacing an unremarkable crust with a high-hydration, open-crumb, focaccia-like dough. His pizzeria has operated since 1987. He bakes the toppings on, as most pizzerias do.
• Gabriele Bonci, at Pizzarium near the Vatican, popularized the approach. He bakes the crust plain or with a thin smear of tomato, lets it cool, then dresses it with toppings for the display case. Each piece is reheated to order, with delicate toppings like greens taken off and put back afterward. Modernist Pizza likens the result to open-faced deli sandwiches, and credits Bonci’s fame for much of the recent interest in “Roman-style” pizza.

The book was told that slice pizza arrived in Rome with bakers from Termoli in the 1960s, but says it couldn’t verify that.

Bianca and rossa. The simplest versions are pizza bianca (olive oil and salt) and pizza rossa (tomato and oregano), staples of Roman bakeries. Forkish treats them as the classic al taglio pizzas. Modernist Pizza calls them bread, a type of focaccia, rather than pizza. Either way, they’re the best place to start, because they show you whether the dough is right.

Pan and dough load

Forkish’s al taglio dough is sized for one 13 × 18-inch half-sheet pan: 620 g of dough over about 1,510 square centimeters. That’s a light load, which bakes into a thin crust, crisp outside and tender inside, thin enough to fold over on itself. Other pan pizzas on this site carry far more dough for their pan:

The loads are calculated from each recipe’s dough weight and the pan’s area. If you want a thicker, more focaccia-like slab, you’re moving toward Sicilian or focaccia pizza, not a better al taglio.

Which pan. A rimmed aluminum half-sheet pan, 13 × 18 inches, fits a standard home oven. Forkish lines it with parchment and doesn’t oil it, because Roman bakery pizzas are baked on a dry hearth with the oil on top, not underneath. Wiping a film of water on the pan first makes the parchment stick flat.

Why not on the stone? Roman bakeries load long strips of dough straight onto the floor of deck ovens 10 to 12 feet deep. A home oven is about 18 inches deep, and Forkish doesn’t recommend trying to load an oiled rectangle of dough sideways onto a hot stone. The pan does the job, and a few minutes directly on the steel at the end crisps the bottom.

The sources disagree on the dough

High hydration is common ground, but the published formulas aren’t interchangeable:

• Forkish uses 72% water, a tiny amount of yeast and no oil in the dough. It rises for 12 to 14 hours at room temperature, then 3 more hours on an oiled plate, and he expects it to be “quite possibly even a little overfermented.”
• Modernist Pizza’s high-hydration al taglio dough is wetter still and contains 3.92% olive oil. In the book’s tests, versions with somewhat less water still gave good crispness and flavor, while going wetter than its master recipe made the pizza bland and chewy, with an uneven crumb.

Wetter isn’t automatically better. Forkish’s dough is easier to handle and makes the thin, crisp Roman bakery style; a wetter, oiled dough gives a puffier, more open crumb. The recipe below is Forkish’s, because it’s sized for a home pan and published in full.

Make pizza rossa al taglio

Time: about 30 minutes of active work and about 18 minutes in the oven. Mix the evening before: the dough rises for 12 to 14 hours, then rests 3 hours more.

Dough (620.3 g)

The 0.3 g of yeast is the quantity in Forkish’s method text, and the 0.08% is calculated from it (0.3 g of 355 g flour). In the EPUB edition consulted for this article, his ingredient table lists 1.5 g instead; this recipe follows the method. Weigh the yeast on a scale that reads to 0.1 g.

Topping

• Olive oil, for the tub and the plate
• 30 g extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for brushing
• 200 g uncooked tomato sauce (canned whole peeled tomatoes blended briefly with salt)
• Dried oregano, to taste

Method

1. Mix. Dissolve the salt in the water, add the yeast, let it hydrate for a minute and swirl to dissolve. Add the flour and mix by hand until all the water is absorbed, then pinch and fold for 30 seconds to 1 minute. Forkish aims for a dough temperature of about 80°F (27°C).
2. Knead. Rest 20 minutes, knead on a lightly floured counter for 30 seconds to 1 minute until smooth, and put the dough in a lightly oiled tub with a lid.
3. Long rise. Leave at room temperature for 12 to 14 hours, until doubled, spread out and bubbly on top.
4. Rest on a plate. Oil a 10- to 11-inch dinner plate, lay the dough on it in a rough rectangle, dust the top with flour, cover and rest for 3 hours at room temperature.
5. Preheat. Put a steel or stone on a middle rack and preheat the oven to 550°F (290°C), allowing 45 to 60 minutes for a steel.
6. Pan it. Wipe a film of water over a half-sheet pan, lay a piece of parchment cut to fit the flat bottom on it and smooth it down. Flour the top of the dough, turn the plate over onto the pan (floured side down, oiled side up), and lift and pull the dough from each end to stretch it to the edges, resting it 10 minutes if it resists. Aim for an even thickness without pressing out the air.
7. Top. Spread a thin film of the olive oil over the dough, then the tomato sauce to within about ¼ inch of the rim. Rest 20 minutes, then sprinkle with oregano.
8. Bake. Set the pan on the steel or stone and bake about 15 minutes, until the crust is baked through and the rim is golden.
9. Crisp the bottom. Slide the pizza, parchment and all, off the pan directly onto the steel or stone for 3 to 4 minutes, until the bottom is golden and crisp. Tongs help.
10. Finish. Brush the top with a thin coat of olive oil straight away, cool for a couple of minutes, peel off the parchment and cut into rectangles. Serve warm or at room temperature.

For pizza bianca, skip the sauce: spread the oil, dimple the whole surface with your fingertips about ½ inch apart, rest 20 minutes, sprinkle with fine sea salt and bake about 15 minutes, until the bubbles are medium brown. Finish on the steel for 2 to 3 minutes if you want a darker, crisper bottom.

Toppings, Iezzi or Bonci

You can top an al taglio pizza either way at home:

• Baked on (Iezzi’s way). Add toppings before the bake, keeping them light and not too wet, since there’s a lot of surface for moisture to collect on.
• Added after (Bonci’s way). Bake a rossa or bianca, let it cool, then add toppings that don’t need cooking, such as cured meats, soft cheeses or dressed greens. If you reheat it, take off delicate toppings first and put them back afterward, as Pizzarium does. This also lets you top different sections of one pan differently.

Why it’s a good place to start

Forkish suggests cautious beginners start with pan pizzas, which are simpler and less error-prone than hearth pizzas. Al taglio adds a long, forgiving room-temperature rise and a bake that takes minutes rather than seconds. The two things to watch are the dough’s thickness, which should be even, and the bottom, which should be golden and crisp before you take it out.

Sources

• Ken Forkish, The Elements of Pizza (2016): chapter 2, “Roman al Taglio Bakery Pizzas” (bakery ovens, the shallow home oven, the pan method); chapter 5, “Pan and Parchment Method for Roman al Taglio and Pan Pizzas” and the advice on starting with pan pizzas; chapter 6, “Al Taglio Pizza Dough” (formula, method, schedule; yeast quantity from the method text of the EPUB edition); chapter 7, “Pizza Bianca and Pizza Rossa” (toppings, bake, finishing on the stone).
• Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, Modernist Pizza (2021), volume 1: pages 108–110 (pizza bianca and rossa as bread, al taglio’s origins, Iezzi and Bonci), page 140 (the style), pages 169–170 (Bonci and Pizzarium), page 289 (al taglio hydration tests) and pages 316 and 319 (oil in al taglio dough).
• Pan areas, dough loads and the yeast percentage are calculated.