Making Pizza at Home with Rudy's Neapolitan
Want to make delicious pizza at home? You do? Excellent! Jim Morgan of the all-conquering Rudy's Neapolitan Pizza in Manchester shares some tricks of the trade...
The closest many get to homemade pizza is peeling the cellophane from a supermarket margherita, which can be a depressing experience for the mind as well as the taste buds. And while wood-fired pizza ovens are becoming more readily available, this alone won’t necessarily guarantee anything better than your shop-bought “authentic taste of Italy”.
But don’t give up because, being the daddy of the dough that he is, Jim Morgan of Rudy's Pizza has a few tips for getting a satisfying slice at home.
“You can make good pizza at home; it won't be authentic neapolitan pizza, but it can still be really good.” Jim’s first thoughts are encouraging. So I guess you’ve done this before then, in an ordinary kitchen? “I made it weekly at uni for my housemates just in a frying pan – like a pizza fritter I guess. I used to shallow fry it in oil and then grill it.”
That sounds easy, almost too easy. “There’s two methods really," says Jim. "I used to make a neapolitan dough (adding some oil to help it cook) and then lay that out in a big, flat frying pan that’s been pre-heated with oil. As the bottom is cooking you quickly add the toppings and then finally you grill it; it should only really take two to three minutes to cook.”
And what were you saying about shallow frying it? “The other way is to deep fat fry the base in an inch of oil; that gives you a really nice, light base. Once you’ve done that you put some tomato on and put it under the grill, adding uncooked mozzarella to the top. It’s a really simple method that’s very popular in Naples.”
But those Rudy’s tomatoes, they’re special – surely it won’t be the same without them? “We have a small deli section with plenty of San Marzano tomatoes to take home," says Jim. "People think we do something really special to them, but we don’t, we just use the best ingredients.”
We can’t guarantee it’ll turn out anything like a Rudy’s pizza, but given the relatively low cost of the ingredients, we can definitely tell you that it’ll be a lot more fun and cost effective than reaching for those takeaway leaflets.
Rudy's Neapolitan Pizza, 9 Cotton Street, Ancoats, rudyspizza.co.uk; follow Rudy's on Twitter at @RudysPizzaMCR