Neapolitan Pizza

Neapolitan pizza carries the EU's Traditional Speciality Guaranteed mark, registered in 2010. TSG is not PDO or PGI: it protects a method, not a place. A pizzeria in Portland or Perth that follows the specification may legally call its pizza Pizza Napoletana STG, and a pizzeria inside Naples that rolls its dough with a pin may not.

The dough allows four things and nothing else: soft wheat flour, type 00 or 0, with a W strength between roughly 220 and 380; water; sea salt; and brewer's yeast or sourdough. No fat, no sugar, no milk. Two finished pizzas are recognised. Marinara is tomato, sliced garlic, oregano and extra virgin olive oil: no cheese at all, which makes it vegan by the rulebook. Margherita is tomato, mozzarella, basil and olive oil, using fior di latte from the southern Apennines, or Mozzarella di Bufala Campana PDO in the version called Margherita Extra.

A stricter private rulebook runs alongside it: the Associazione Verace Pizza Napoletana, founded in Naples in 1984, inspects pizzerias one at a time and issues a numbered plaque. In 2017 UNESCO then inscribed the art of the Neapolitan pizzaiuolo on its intangible cultural heritage list: the craft and its transmission from master to apprentice. Not the pizza.

The first surprise is that it is not crisp. The base is soft, pliable and slightly wet in the middle, with a puffed rim that pulls apart like very good bread rather than snapping, and you can fold the whole pizza in four without cracking it.

Flavour arrives in three layers. The charred blisters on the rim (the leopard spotting) are properly bitter, and that bitterness is the seasoning of the crust. Underneath, the tomato tastes raw, bright and acidic, because it is raw, hand-crushed and salted, and cooks only during those 90 seconds. Then fior di latte, a fresh high-moisture cheese, which tastes of milk and leaves small pools of whey rather than an even blanket.

In Naples the pizza arrives whole, one per person, often wider than the plate, and it is eaten immediately, within two or three minutes, before the centre gives up. Use a knife and fork, cutting from the point toward the rim: that is the local method, not a formality. The alternative is to fold it in four, 'a portafoglio', and eat it with your hands, which is how it comes out of the takeaway window. Do not ask for grated cheese, do not reach for chilli oil before tasting, and do not send it back for being soft in the middle.

Making it at home, the dough is the easy part and the oven is the problem. Mix flour, water at 55-62 per cent, salt around 50 g per litre of water and a very small amount of yeast; rest the mass two hours, divide into 200-250 g balls, prove four to six hours. Shape with your fingertips from the centre out, pushing the gas into the rim, and never touch it with a rolling pin.

Dress it in order (raw crushed tomato spiralled from the centre, drained cheese in separate pieces rather than an even layer, basil, a thin spiral of olive oil) and use less than instinct suggests. On a preheated steel at 285-300 °C it needs four to six minutes; in a portable gas oven at 450 °C, 60-90 seconds with one turn halfway.

This is not a keeping product. It is built to be eaten a couple of minutes after it leaves the peel, and it begins changing at once: steam from the topping migrates down into the base and softens it, and as the crumb cools the starch retrogrades and the rim turns firm and papery. Anything left over is usually covered and reheated the following day. The best route back is a non-stick pan with a lid over medium heat for three or four minutes, which dries the base again and remelts the cheese. A microwave only adds more steam.

What genuinely keeps is the dough. Balls hold in the fridge at 4 °C for 48 to 72 hours when the yeast was dosed low, and they need two or three hours at room temperature before shaping, because a cold ball tears instead of stretching. A baked pizza can go in the freezer, but the open crumb and the leopard spotting never come back after thawing.

The rim tells you most of it. The cornicione stands one to two centimetres high, puffed but not blown into a hollow tube, with irregular bubbles inside and leopard spotting in patches rather than an even tan. A uniformly golden edge came out of an oven that was not hot enough; a huge empty one came from dough that over-proofed. The base is thin and soft, around 30 to 35 centimetres across, and a well made one folds into quarters, the portafoglio, without cracking.

The tomato should read raw, acidic and vegetal, not like a cooked sauce with garlic and oregano in it. The mozzarella sits in separate patches leaving small pools of whey, never wall to wall. That is what separates it from a New York slice, which is crisp, sauced with cooked tomato and covered edge to edge with low moisture cheese, and from Roman tonda, which is cracker thin. Places working to the rules display an AVPN plaque, and the STG wording appears on packs of frozen versions made to the same spec.

In the United States, Eataly and Gustiamo stock Caputo flour, PDO San Marzano tomatoes and fior di latte. Expect roughly $5-8 for a 1 kg bag of Caputo Pizzeria, $40-55 for the 25 kg sack, $5-9 for a 400 g tin of certified San Marzano PDO, and $8-12 per pound for fresh fior di latte.

In the United Kingdom, Ocado and importers such as Vorrei, Nifeislife and Sous Chef ship nationwide, and Natoora supplies fresh Campanian mozzarella. A 1 kg bag of type 00 pizzeria flour runs £3-5, a tin of San Marzano PDO £3.50-6, and buffalo mozzarella £4-6 per 125 g ball.

On equipment, a 6-10 mm baking steel costs about $80-130 or £70-110 and is the best-value upgrade by a distance; portable gas ovens such as the Ooni Koda or Gozney Arc sit at $400-700 or £350-600. A 30-33 cm peel is not optional. Eating out, a margherita at an AVPN-certified pizzeria costs $17-26 in the US and £10-16 in the UK, against €4.50-7 in Naples.

In Naples, three addresses in the historic centre cover the classic version. L'Antica Pizzeria da Michele in Forcella has served only marinara and margherita for over a century and runs on paper tickets and queueing. Gino e Toto Sorbillo sits on via dei Tribunali, the ancient decumanus, a few doors from Di Matteo, which also fries pizza at a street counter. L'Antica Pizzeria Port'Alba, opened in 1830, is counted as the oldest sit-down pizzeria in the city.

Away from the tourist spine: Starita in Materdei, known for its fried montanarine; Concettina ai Tre Santi in the Rione Sanità; Pizzeria La Notizia in Vomero, where Enzo Coccia first treated pizza as cooking rather than street food; and 50 Kalò by Ciro Salvo on piazza Sannazaro.

Outside Italy, the AVPN certifies several hundred pizzerias across some 60 countries and publishes a searchable directory, the fastest way to find a real one. In New York, Una Pizza Napoletana, Kesté and Song' e Napule are the reference points; in London, 50 Kalò sits near Trafalgar Square and da Michele has an outpost in Stoke Newington.