Marinara Pizza

Dough

1. Make a yeast dough from wheat flour. The basic pizza dough recipe I use is described in detail in the recipe Pizza dough.

   

2. Stretch the risen dough and place it on the pan. Once the dough has risen, knead it briefly and roll it out into a flat round 5-7 mm thick. Lay it on the pan, lightly greased with olive oil beforehand. Be sure to prick the dough with a fork in several places. Cover the dough with a towel and let it rest for 15 minutes so it rises a little.

   

Sauce

1. For the sauce, the tomatoes must be perfectly red and ripe.

2. Prepare the tomatoes. Scald them with boiling water and peel off the skin. Cut each tomato in half crosswise and remove the seeds and the core where the stem was. Chop the flesh with a knife.

3. Season the sauce. Add 0.5 tsp sugar (2 g) and 1 tbsp olive oil to the tomato flesh. Grate garlic into the sauce on a fine grater, as much as you like; I add 1-2 cloves. Add salt and 2-3 pinches of dried aromatic herbs traditional for Italian cuisine: basil, oregano, savory and so on. By the way, there are decent ready-made mixes of dried herbs with no chemical additives on sale. Stir the sauce gently. It doesn’t need to be cooked.

   Marinara sauce should not be runny. If there is a lot of liquid in the sauce, wait a little for the heavy part to settle and pour off the excess liquid.

   

Assembly and baking

1. Spread the sauce over the dough on the pan.

   

   Peel 2 cloves of garlic and slice them very thinly, almost translucent, across the clove. Arrange the garlic over the sauce.

   

   Sprinkle with dried oregano. You can use fresh oregano in principle, but it is usually hard to find, and dried works perfectly well.

2. Add the olives and Parmesan, both optional; the pizza with its sauce is essentially ready. Cut pitted black olives in half and arrange them over the sauce as well.

   

   Sprinkle grated Parmesan over the sauce closer to the edge, so that a large area in the center is only sauce. Alternatively, grate the Parmesan on a fine grater and then grind it further in a blender until fine, which makes it easier to sprinkle over the pizza.

   

3. Drizzle the pizza with olive oil and put it into an oven preheated to 200°C. Baking time is 20 minutes. Since every oven is different, check the dough by lifting it with the tip of a knife: when it is done, the underside starts to turn golden.

   

Serving

1. Scatter small leaves of fresh basil over the finished pizza.

   

   Cut the pizza into 6-8 slices with a pizza wheel and serve while hot.