High and well-cooked crust, perfectly balanced crunchiness and softness, unique flavour and inimitable aroma: a pizza is certainly one of the most loved and well-known dishes in the world.
Raise your hand if you have not tried at least once in your life to mix flour, water and yeast at home.
If ordering pizza from your trusted pizza maker is a certainty, making it at home adds that pinch of personal satisfaction to mere gastronomic pleasure.
But how can I make the perfect pizza at home? The secret lies in the cooking: in a few minutes the dough must become crunchy on the outside and soft and moist on the inside, while the sauce must cook without burning or moistening the base too much.
However, common domestic ovens cannot reach the high temperatures necessary to cook pizza or convey the heat in the right manner, with the result that baked pizzas are often disappointing and far from the ones eaten in a pizzeria.
This is why the Alfa Research and Development team has studied the principles of perfect pizza cooking by designing, even for domestic ovens, a particular technology, thanks to which the sauce cooks at one temperature and the dough at another.
But how can an oven cook dough and sauce differently and always make you look good with friends invited for dinner? Let’s find out below!
In this article we’ll see:
- 7 tips for making the perfect pizza at home
- How a pizza oven should be
- Heat Genius™: the Alfa solution for a pizza as good as in a restaurant
– Why doesn’t the pizza cook underneath?
– How do you maintain the oven temperature?
– How do you avoid burning the pizza in the oven? - How to make the perfect pizza at home thanks to Alfa ovens
7 tips for making the perfect pizza at home
Kneading pizza for our dear ones is an act of love, of course, but science also plays a fundamental role.
What could happen is that you make a mistake in adding water, that you kneaded for too long, or that you let the dough rise too little.
As we saw in a previous article, in order to make a perfect pizza at home you need a few simple ingredients which, when combined together correctly, can create fragrant and tasty pizzas.
Just follow these 7 tips to create the right dough and get flawless cooking:
- Choose flour that has a W strength of 260-350;
- Do not mix salt and yeast together so as not to ruin the leavening;
- Always add the oil at the end otherwise its stickiness could compromise the success of the dough;
- Use a little bit of yeast to make your pizza more digestible;
- Adhere to the rising times which can vary between 12 and 20 hours. Advice has it to make the dough the day before and let it rise overnight so as to obtain a soft and digestible pizza;
- Roll out the dough gently so as not to risk ruining the leavening;
- Use quality ingredients and mozzarella with little water inside so as not to moisten the dough too much during cooking.
Once the dough is ready, you are halfway there and the oven will make the difference between an excellent pizza and a mediocre one.
How a pizza oven should be
Without a well-designed and built oven, pizzas certainly won’t turn out as they should. This is also supported by the “The Physics of cooking good Pizza” study published in the arXiv science magazine.
According to the two physicists, the ideal oven for cooking pizzas is the one that manages to reach high temperatures and, at the same time, to generate the right circulation of air flows by making the heat reach every point of the cooking chamber.
Alfa’s home pizza ovens not only have these features, but they are all equipped with a particular technology called Heat Genius™ that allows you to churn out pizzas made at home like in a pizzeria.
The ability to reach high temperatures, the best materials and the most modern technology implemented in Alfa ovens allow the ingredients not to burn and the dough not to become like a biscuit.
Thanks to their particular construction, Alfa pizza ovens, both wood and gas, can perfectly cook a pizza in just 60 seconds.
Furthermore, the design with attention to the smallest details offers you a comfortable cooking experience and is well suited to integrate with the style of any environment, whether it’s a balcony or an outdoor kitchen in the garden.
Heat Genius™: the Alfa solution for a pizza as good as in a restaurant
What makes the difference between a tasty and fragrant pizza and a bad one, with the same dough and ingredients used, is the oven.
What makes the difference is not so much the type of fuel, gas or wood, but the materials used and the technology implemented.
Often, the cheap domestic ovens on the market fail to reach the high temperatures necessary to cook pizzas and are made with poor quality materials that cannot keep the heat inside the cooking chamber.
The result is a gummy pizza where the base will tend to burn and the toppings may not cook sufficiently, and worth considering is that this type of oven does not allow you to churn out more pizzas in succession if you have several guests at the table.
Alfa home pizza ovens are designed to solve these issues and allow you to cook a perfect pizza at home.
Thanks to the innovative Heat Genius™ technology, the oven is developed to cook the base and the toppings at different temperatures so as to allow you to consistently churn out tasty and well-cooked pizzas.
But how can the oven cook the base and toppings differently if you have set only one cooking temperature for the pizza?
Thanks to three elements which are the heart of Heat Genius™ technology and make Alfa ovens intelligent:
- HeatKeeper™ Refractory Brick
- DoubleDown Ceramic Superwool® insulation
- Patented Full Effect Full Circulation Flue System®
Thanks to this technological trio, the heat is slowly released from the refractory brick and uniformly radiated through the oven’s curved walls.
This results in a crunchy dough and condiments which, since they cook faster, release part of their moisture without the risk of wetting the base too much, leaving it hopelessly raw.
Each element of the Heat Genius™ technology is designed to make the perfect pizza at home, thus responding to the most common needs and frequently asked questions of home pizza makers such as:
- Why doesn’t the pizza cook underneath?
- How do you maintain the oven temperature?
- How do you avoid burning the pizza?
Let’s see how these problems can be solved thanks to a pizza oven equipped with Heat Genius™ technology.
Why doesn’t the pizza cook underneath?
When using very moist ingredients to season your pizzas or a particularly watery mozzarella, the base may remain too moist and not cook as it should.
The HeatKeeper™ refractory brick made by Alfa is designed to solve this problem as it quickly cooks your pizzas making them crunchy and soft at the right point even when they are particularly rich in seasoning.
The refractory brick, unlike lava stone or ceramic, which are two materials commonly used in normal pizza ovens on the market, is able to absorb and store heat in an extremely more efficient way.
How do you maintain the oven temperature?
If the oven is not made with quality materials that do not disperse the heat externally, there is little you can do.
This is why in Alfa ovens, the space between the stainless steel walls is filled with a particular insulating material: DoubleDown Ceramic Superwool®.
This ceramic fibre is able to offer double resistance to heat compared to that provided by common rock wool normally used in domestic ovens.
This type of insulation keeps the heat inside the cooking chamber better, allowing you to bake a perfect pizza at home and also save on fuel.
How do you avoid burning the pizza?
If the pizza oven, whether it be wood-fired or gas-fired, is not designed to better handle high temperatures, it will not be able to cook the pizza well and will tend to burn it.
In Alfa Heat Genius™ ovens, thanks to the patented Full Effect Full Circulation Flue System®, the hot air circulates in the cooking chamber and is pushed downwards so as to better heat the refractory brick and cook the pizza to perfection.
This system allows the oven to keep the temperature constant and uniform so as to allow you to cook both the base and the toppings of the pizza without burning them.
