How to Make Neapolitan Pizza at Home (Without Making Your Own Dough)

Our Neapolitan pizza dough balls arrive frozen to semi-frozen and individually packaged, so they’re easy to pop into the freezer until pizza night. Each dough ball weighs 250g and makes roughly one 12-inch pizza.

If you’re not planning to use them when they arrive, put them straight into your freezer. They’ll keep frozen for up to three months.

When pizza night comes around, defrost the number you need and give the dough plenty of time to prove. We recommend leaving your dough balls somewhere warm for around five hours, until they’re lovely, soft and pillowy.

And yes, “pillowy” is a technical pizza term in our house.

This is one of those little things that makes pizza night much easier.

Before you start stretching your dough, get your sauce, cheese and toppings ready to go.

You’ll also want a little flour or semolina on your worktop to stop your dough sticking. And get your oven nice and hot.

Pizza loves heat, so whatever you’re cooking it in, give it plenty of time to reach temperature before your first pizza goes anywhere near it.

Please put the rolling pin down.

We know it’s tempting, but stretching your pizza dough by hand helps to keep all that lovely air in the crust.

Start by placing your proved dough ball onto a lightly floured surface.

Using your fingertips, gently press from the centre outwards, leaving a slightly thicker edge around the outside for your crust.

Then carefully pick it up and stretch it using your hands, turning it as you go.

You’re aiming for roughly 10 to 12 inches, but please don’t get the tape measure out. Pizza doesn’t have to be perfectly round!

In fact, we think the slightly wonky ones usually have more character.

Now for the good stuff.

Add a thin layer of pizza sauce across your base, leaving your crust uncovered.

The key word here is thin.

More sauce doesn’t necessarily mean a better pizza. Too much can leave the centre of your base soggy, particularly when you’re cooking in a conventional home oven.

Start with less than you think you need. You can always add a little more.

This is where we stop telling you what to do.

Classic Margherita? Beautiful.

Pepperoni? Absolutely.

Nduja? Even better.

Something involving pineapple that will start an argument at the dinner table? That’s between you and your family.

Whatever you choose, try not to overload your pizza. A handful of really good ingredients will usually give you a much better result than piling everything in the fridge onto one base.

Our personal starting point is good tomato sauce and proper Fior di Latte mozzarella, then take it wherever you fancy.

You don’t need a fancy pizza oven to use our dough. If you have one, brilliant. Our Neapolitan dough works beautifully in pizza ovens, but it also works in a conventional kitchen oven, on a pizza stone, on the BBQ or in a ceramic kamado.

The important thing is getting your cooking surface properly hot before the pizza goes in.

Cooking times will depend on the oven and temperature you’re using. In a conventional oven with a piping-hot pizza stone, you’re looking for a beautifully cooked base, melted cheese and a golden crust.

Keep an eye on it. Pizza waits for nobody.

Yes! Will it be exactly the same as a pizza cooked at extremely high temperatures in a professional pizza oven? Of course not. But you can still make a fantastic pizza in your kitchen.

A pizza stone or steel can make a big difference because it holds heat underneath the base, but don’t let a lack of specialist equipment stop you.

Our whole philosophy is that great pizza should be something everyone can enjoy making. There’s a pizza chef in everyone!

We’ve been making pizza in Sunderland for more than 30 years. What started with Jack and me running our own little takeaway eventually grew into supplying our dough to pizzerias and food businesses across the North East. Now we get to send that same dough to people making pizzas in their own kitchens too. And we absolutely love that!

We take the dough very seriously. Everything else should be fun.

So get some flour on the worktop, choose your toppings, gather your favourite people and have a go. Because after more than three decades of making pizzas, we still believe the same thing we did at the beginning.

It’s all about the dough.