Pizza Margherita

There’s nowhere to hide with a Margherita pizza, so you have to get every

element just right. Using good-quality tinned Marzano tomatoes is key here.

A good creamy buffalo mozzarella and a few basil leaves are all you need to

finish it off. Simple, but absolute perfection.

Makes 4

Ingredients

• 1quantity pizza dough, shaped into 4 balls and ready to roll out

• 400g tin San Marzano tomatoes, drained

• 30g Parmesan, freshly grated

• 3 x 125g buffalo mozzarella balls, drained

• A handful of basil leaves, roughly torn

• Extra virgin olive oil, to drizzle

Method

1. For the topping, using a blender or food processor, blitz the tinned tomatoes

until smooth.

2. If you are using a standard domestic oven to cook your pizzas, heat to its

highest setting.

3. Roll out each ball of dough to a thin round. If using a domestic oven, dry-fry

the bases.

4. Put a small ladleful of tomato pulp in the middle of each pizza base (dry-fried

if cooking in a standard oven, uncooked if using a pizza oven, see below) and

spread out to 2–3cm from the edge. Sprinkle with the grated Parmesan,

then break off little pieces of mozzarella and scatter all over the tomatoes

5. Bake each pizza on a tray in the hot oven for 5–7 minutes until the topping is

melted and golden and the pizza crust is crisp. Scatter the basil over the pizzas

and drizzle with extra virgin olive oil. Serve at once.

Outdoor pizza oven

Heat up your pizza oven. Roll out your pizza bases to 25–30cm. Prepare the topping (as above) and distribute over the uncooked bases. Bake in the hot oven for 1 minute–1 minute 20 seconds.

Taken from Paul Hollywood’s BAKE, published by Bloomsbury

Photograph © Haarala Hamilton