THIN-CRUST PIZZA

UNLESS YOU BUILD A BRICK OVEN IN YOUR kitchen, it's not possible to duplicate thin pizzeria-style pies at home. Commercial pizza ovens can reach 800 degrees; home ovens just can't compete. That said, homemade thin-crust pizza is delicious, if different, from the pies you get when you eat out. The crust is chewier, crisper, and not nearly as greasy.

While American pizza parlors weigh down their crusts with pounds of toppings, we prefer to follow the Italian method and use a restrained hand when topping a thin-crust pizza. This is partly out of necessity (without the extreme heat of a commercial oven, crusts with so much cheese and sauce will be soggy) and partly because we like pizzas this way. After all, you are making homemade bread, and pizza should be about the crust as well as the cheese and sauce.

In our testing, we found that baking thin-crust pizza on tiles or a pizza stone is a must. Thin crusts baked on a pizza screen (a perforated pan) or baking sheet will not be as crisp and chewy. (See Tools of the Trade, chapter one, for more information on buying these items.)

Our testing revealed that an oven temperature of 450 degrees is your best bet. We could not detect any extra crispness in a pizza cooked in a 500-degree oven. What we did notice was a fair amount of smoke in our kitchen. If your oven works well at 500 degrees without smoking, feel free to bake pizzas at this temperature; you will shave a minute or two off the cooking time.

This chapter starts with some simple pizzas that are baked plain and then topped with herb oil, pesto, or cheeses. Pizzas with raw toppings such as fresh tomatoes, prosciutto, and arugula are next, followed by more complex pizzas with cooked meat, vegetable, and seafood toppings.

Keep the following tips in mind when making thin-crust pizza.

DUST PEEL WITH SEMOLINA. With its fine, sandy texture, semolina keeps pizza dough from sticking to peels. Cornmeal can be used, but we find that its coarser texture can make the bottom of the crust a bit gritty.

ADD MELTING CHEESES AT END OF BAKING. To keep soft cheeses like mozzarella moist and lush, we prefer to add them toward the end of the baking time. When added earlier, mozzarella tends to shrivel up and dry out. Adding it later also gets more impact from less cheese, keeping the fat content to a minimum. Grating cheeses, like Parmesan, may be added at the start or near the end of baking as desired.

BAKING TIMES WILL VARY. Depending on your oven, the type of stone or tiles used, the size of the dough round, and the amount of topping, thin-crust pizzas may be done in as little as five or six minutes or may take as long as twelve minutes. Larger pies with heavier or juicier toppings may sometimes require closer to fifteen minutes. Don't pull a pizza out of the oven until the edge of the crust is golden brown and the toppings are sizzling.