I love making pizza, and I love my pizza dough. Javi and I make it quite often, and sometimes he even makes it by himself!
The dough for this white pizza is the same dough I use for my regular pizza; you can see the video of that pizza below for reference. The crust is crispy and absolutely delicious! If you haven’t tried making it yet, I highly recommend it. This recipe makes two medium pizzas, 20‑24 cm in diameter.
My white pizza (pizza bianca in Italian) has a mixture of ricotta, Parmesan, and mozzarella cheese. Since it’s such a simple recipe in terms of ingredients, try to use good quality cheeses. You can also add a blue cheese on top if you like, such as Gorgonzola, Roquefort, etc. I finished mine with basil, but you could also use arugula or watercress. Get creative!
White pizza always has garlic, which gives it a bit more character. This time, I used confit garlic and mixed it with the ricotta before adding it to the pizza. Confit garlic is incredibly mild and a real treat! When I was developing the pizza recipe, I started thinking about how to add the garlic without it being too strong, and I remembered a recipe Ari from Well Seasoned Studio had recently made. It works perfectly, and if you like garlic, you can easily double the amount.
White Pizza Recipe
Main course
Preparation time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 10 minutes
Total Time: 40 minutes
Serves: 2 people, makes 2 pizzas of 20‑25cm in diameter
Author: Fatima
Ingredients
| Ingredient | Quantity |
|---|---|
| All‑purpose flour | 255 g |
| Fine salt | 5 g |
| Instant yeast (or 16g fresh yeast or 8g dry yeast*) | 4 g |
| Warm water | 175 g |
| Olive oil | 10 g |
| White sugar | 5 g |
| Semolina or polenta (for the base) | as needed |
| The toppings: | |
| Ricotta or very crumbled fresh cheese (dried with absorbent paper) | 200 g |
| Mozzarella (buffalo or regular) | 100 g |
| Freshly grated Parmesan cheese (Grana Padano used) | 50 g |
| Confit garlic cloves | 2 |
| Salt and pepper | to taste |
| Extra virgin olive oil | to taste |
| Basil leaves | to taste |
Instructions
For the dough
- Mix the flour, salt, sugar, and yeast in a bowl.
- Make a hole in the center and put in the warm water and olive oil.
- Mix with a spoon or spatula from the center, gradually adding the flour from the sides.
- When the spoon no longer helps you mix, use your hands to incorporate the dough. Eventually, you’ll find you’ll need to put everything on the table and mix it a little with your hands, kneading it slightly.
- If it sticks to your hands at this point, gradually add a little flour until it no longer sticks. Don’t add too much because if it dries out too much it won’t rise as easily.
- Knead the dough for 30 minutes by hand or 15 minutes in a stand mixer with the dough hook attachment at maximum speed. At this point, you can freeze the dough for up to one month.
- Now it needs to rise. If you’re making a medium pizza, shape the dough into a ball and place it on a clean baking sheet or surface sprinkled with a little semolina or polenta to prevent sticking. Cover it with a damp cloth to keep the dough from drying out. If you’re making personal pizzas like mine, around 20cm in diameter, divide the dough in half first before letting it rise. If your dough was frozen, it needs to thaw completely at room temperature before you start timing the rising. It should rise for a total of at least 2 hours and a maximum of 4.
- During the last 30 minutes of rising, preheat your oven to its highest temperature, including the broiler. If you’re unsure of the maximum temperature, set it to 250°C (480°F). Place your cast iron skillet, pizza stone, or baking tray inside the oven to preheat to the same temperature. Position it near the top of the oven.
To assemble the pizza
- Once the dough has risen, stretch it out with your fingers on a surface dusted with semolina or polenta to prevent sticking. First, press down with your fingers, leaving a small border that won’t have any toppings. Then, turn it over and repeat. For further reference, see the video above.
- Once the dough is rolled out thin, spread the ricotta, which you’ve previously mixed with the confit garlic. If you don’t want to make confit garlic, just use a grated or finely chopped clove.
- Sprinkle the Parmesan and mozzarella cheeses over the ricotta, always leaving a couple of centimeters of the edge without cheese.
- If you have a large pizza peel or even a cake lifter, you can transfer the pizza to your pan/stone/baking tray using a little semolina on top to make it easier to slide. Otherwise, have someone help you slide the pizza along the edge of your table and into the pan where you’ll be cooking it. Do this quickly! If you do it too slowly, it will crack.
- When it comes out of the oven, we put the fresh basil leaves on top, season with salt and pepper, drizzle with olive oil and serve immediately because there’s nothing better than a pizza fresh out of the oven.
Grades (Notes)
- If you are using fresh or dry yeast, first dissolve it in warm water and let it sit for 5 minutes to reactivate it before adding it to the dough.
Nutrition Facts
| Nutrition | Amount per Serving | % Daily Value* |
|---|---|---|
| Calories | 380 kcal | 19% |
| Total Fat | 19 g | 24% |
| Saturated Fat | 9 g | 45% |
| Trans Fat | 0 g | |
| Cholesterol | 45 mg | 15% |
| Sodium | 620 mg | 27% |
| Total Carbohydrate | 36 g | 13% |
| Dietary Fiber | 2 g | 7% |
| Total Sugars | 3 g | |
| Protein | 16 g | 32% |
| Calcium | 350 mg | 27% |
| Iron | 2 mg | 11% |
Disclaimer: Nutrition estimates are for general guidance only, based on a 2,000‑calorie diet. Actual values vary with cheese types, dough thickness, and added toppings.
Questions and advice about homemade white pizza with Galician cheese
- How do you bake your pizzas? — To make a good pizza in a home oven, it needs to be able to reach at least 240‑250°C (465‑480°F). It also helps a lot to have a pizza stone or bread stone on the oven floor, or a steel baking sheet perfect for this purpose. For the dough to rise like crazy, it needs a good dose of heat at the base.
I’ve been using a somewhat hybrid method to bake my pizzas for a while now, derived from a trick by Heston Blumenthal:
- I place the steel plate on an oven tray quite close to the grill (a hand’s width away at most),
- I heat it only with the grill until it’s boiling hot (over 250º) and
- I make the pizza on top of it, on parchment paper, or directly.
- It gives excellent results and has several advantages: you save waiting time and having to heat the entire oven space to a very high temperature; I haven’t measured it, but common sense dictates that you should save energy.
- If your grill is not powerful enough, you will have no choice but to cook the pizza directly on the oven floor or on a stone/griddle by heating the entire oven.
As you can see from the instructions, you have to add the different ingredients at different times during cooking because they don’t all cook at the same rate. The egg yolk is added last, and I only cook it for a few seconds so it doesn’t completely set. You might be thinking, “What a pain!” Well, I think you can handle 11‑12 minutes of total pizza cooking time.
- What proportion of whole wheat flour is in this dough? — It’s not very much, 75g out of a total of 300g of flour, 25%. Even so, the pizza isn’t as fluffy as it would be with all white flour. But the flavor of a well‑fermented homemade dough made with quality flour is unbeatable. And the crunch, too.
- Can I put tomato sauce on it? — Yes, you can, but it won’t be a white pizza anymore, of course.