Pizza Marinara Napoletana

Ingredients

• 600g Italian 00 flour, W260 to W300
• 380ml cold water
• 18g fine sea salt
• 1g fresh yeast, or a scant 0.3g instant dried yeast
• 400g tinned San Marzano tomatoes
• 4 garlic cloves
• 2 tsp dried oregano
• 4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• Fine sea salt, for the tomato
• Semolina flour, for dusting

Before you cook

• Crush the tinned tomatoes by hand into a bowl, leaving them coarse rather than smooth, and season them with a good pinch of salt.
• Peel the garlic and slice it as thinly as you can.
• Set a pizza stone or steel on the top shelf of the oven.

Steps

1. Pour the cold water into a large bowl and stir in the salt until it dissolves.
2. Whisk in about 60g of the flour to make a thin slurry.
3. Crumble the yeast into the slurry and stir until it disappears.
4. Add the rest of the flour in three additions, mixing with a wooden spoon until a rough mass forms.
5. Tip the dough onto an unfloured worktop and knead for 15 minutes, until it is smooth, tight and no longer sticks to your hands.
6. Cover the dough with an upturned bowl and rest it on the worktop for two hours.
7. Divide the dough into four pieces of about 250g each.
8. Shape each piece into a tight, seamless ball by folding the edges into the centre and rolling it under a cupped hand.
9. Set the balls well apart in a lidded box and prove them at cool room temperature for six to eight hours, until they have spread and doubled.
10. Heat the oven as hot as it will go, at least 250 degrees Celsius, and leave the stone to heat for a full 45 minutes.
11. Dust a work surface with semolina and lift one ball onto it, keeping the smooth side upwards.
12. Press the ball out from the centre with your fingertips, pushing the gas into a 2cm border and never touching that border itself.
13. Stretch the disc over the backs of your hands to about 28cm across, leaving the rim puffy.
14. Slide the base onto a semolina-dusted peel.
15. Spoon about 80g of crushed tomato into the centre and spread it out to the border with the back of the spoon in a spiral.
16. Scatter over a quarter of the sliced garlic and a good pinch of oregano.
17. Drizzle a tablespoon of olive oil over the top in a spiral.
18. Slide the pizza onto the hot stone and bake for five to seven minutes, until the rim is puffed and spotted with dark blisters.
19. Shape, top and bake the remaining three pizzas one at a time in the same way.
20. Serve each pizza whole and uncut, straight from the oven.