Pizza Recipes

Pizza is a dish enjoyed by people the world over. Chefs and enthusiasts alike share a love for pizza and its endless possibilities, from elegant appetizer to hearty one-dish meal. Few know how simple it is to create delicious handcrafted traditional or contemporary style pizzas at home.

There are a variety of pizza styles including the authentic style Italian favorites Neapolitan and Sicilian, New York and Chicago, and the newer California and Gourmet styles. These pizzas feature a variety of crust styles including thin crust, thick crust, deep-dish, and stuffed. They may be topped with a sweet sauce, a tangy sauce, a white sauce, or pesto. One or two toppings, or a dozen may follow before being baked in a hot oven or tossed on the grill.

Pizza is a favorite year round and all through the day. Enjoy a delicious breakfast pizza, an appetizer pizza, or finish your favorite meal with a dessert pizza. Whatever your style, or when you are looking for a new family favorite, we’ve got fantastic recipes and instruction for you.

Using the recipes from PizzaRecipes.com enables anyone to make the best possible pizza in their own home.

Pizza Making

Pizza making at home is fun and an activity the whole family can enjoy. Following any recipe, any person can create a fabulous pizza crust, develop their favorite sauce, and then explore the realm of toppings. Quick rise dough recipes and premade crusts can have a pizza in the oven in minutes.

For those wanting to explore the artisan style of pizza making, a bit more time and effort are required.

To truly create a pizza in your favorite style, you need to start with a great dough recipe. Some dough recipes require kneading with a bread hook in a stand mixer, or several hours to overnight to rise and develop flavor and texture. Special equipment such as a deep-dish pizza pan or pizza stone may be needed to create the perfect dish.

The results are worth the time, expense, and work involved. Once you’ve experienced the taste of good quality, fresh, homemade pizza, it will become a regular part of your everyday meal planning.

Crafting Homemade Pizza – Learn more about the art of producing pizzeria quality pizza at home with proven techniques, expert tips, and fresh ingredients. Enjoy our growing library of articles, videos, and resources aimed at helping you master homemade pizza.

To learn more about specific pizza styles, including delicious recipes:

Italian Pizza – The original pizza was developed in Italy hundreds of years ago. Simple in style, delicious in flavor and texture, the culinary world seeks to emulate these original pizza styles.

Neapolitan Pizza – is thin crust pizza topped with crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese. If you are a pizzeria, you can be certified by the V.P.N, or Verace Pizza Napoletana as a true Neapolitan pizza maker. There are several qualifications a pizzeria must meet, and the variations beyond the original pizza toppings are limited to marinara, Margherita, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and prosciutto di Parma.

Neapolitan style thin crust pizza is a style that many will want to emulate at home, as it is the style we’ve grown to love at our favorite pizza parlors. The pizza features a slightly puffy crust edge that gradually becomes thinner until its paper thin in the center of the pie. While thin crust pizza dough can be made in minutes, some recipes require several hours to overnight for the dough to rise. Some dough recipes may make use of a “sponge”, a mixture of warm water, yeast, and flour that requires half a day to overnight to ferment. The sponge adds a tangy flavor and richness to the crust.

Sicilian Pizza is thick pizza, rectangular in shape and almost always baked in a pan. Traditional versions of this pizza style do not include cheese. Most Sicilian style pizzas are topped with a thin coating of tomato sauce or garlic anchovy paste, herbs and seasonings.

Italy offers a wide variety of pizza styles with Neapolitan and Sicilian being among the most popular. See our Italian pizza section for a deeper look into Italy’s pizza culture with recipes for making amazing authentic Italian pizza.

Additionally, Italy has given us many dishes such as calzone, stromboli, foccacia, and bruschetta to name just a few that we endeavor to uncover and represent here for culinary enjoyment.

New York Pizza is notable for its hand tossed, thin crust prepared from “00’ pizza flour. New York’s original pizzerias bake paper thin pizzas in hot brick ovens that create a crust with smoky flavor, and puffy edges. The high gluten “00” flour creates a magnificent crust. These pies are often topped with fresh mozzarella and Italian sausage.

New Haven Pizza has a thin, brittle crust prepared from slightly coarser flour than the New York pizza “00” flour. Pizzas are cooked in hot ovens until the crust has a slight char along the edge and a hard, chewy texture.

Chicago Pizza is synonymous with deep-dish pizza. Pizzeria Uno created the original American deep-dish pizza in the early 1940’s. Chicago deep-dish pizza is a hearty pizza baked in special high-walled pizza pan. Featuring a thick, biscuit like crust that is usually topped with an assortment of toppings, often including mozzarella cheese, tomatoes, and Italian sausage seasoned with fennel. The pizza resembles a pie more than flatbread, and borders on being considered a casserole. Chicago deep-dish pizza is typically eaten with a knife and fork. There are other varieties of pizza such as stuffed pizza that originated in the Chicago area, and have a large following of fans.

California Pizza can also be categorized as gourmet pizza. A California pizza is topped with any variety of toppings that a culinary artist can conceive. California pizza typically has a thin crust with a fine, slightly chewy texture. Barbeque chicken and garlic chicken pizzas are popular recipes for California pizza, a style limited only by imagination and the use of fresh ingredients.

Pizza Dough

Pizza dough recipes are available for the home chef to create the complete spectrum of favorite pizzeria style pizzas. Pizza enthusiasts can create thin crusts for styles such as Neapolitan, New York, and New Haven. Thick, thin, deep-dish or stuffed, each pizza style has its own subtle characteristics, requiring the right dough recipe, proven techniques and perhaps some specialized equipment to produce a product similar in quality to your favorite neighborhood pizzeria.

Pizza Sauce

There are many choices for pizza sauce, from the traditional tomato sauce or sauce prepared from olive oil, a great pizza cannot be achieved without a great sauce.

Tomato sauces are the most common. These sauces are found on Italian pizzas as well as many other styles pizzas, as the tomato flavor is somewhat synonymous with pizza. These sauces can be very simple preparations or very complex sauces that take hours to create. Tomato sauces are prepared from both fresh and canned tomato products. Some tomato sauces are raw in form, while others are cooked before usage. Tomato sauces can be sweet, tangy, or sour. They can be light on extra flavor or combined with herbs, spices and garlic. Tomato sauces are delicious and limited only by the imagination.

Flavored olive oils are often used as a topping for pizza. Olive oil is infused with herbs and spices such as basil and oregano, and garlic. These flavored oils are prepared with or without cooking and when ready are brushed over the dough to add great flavor.
Homemade pizza sauce is a delicious way to top your pizza dough. We offer a great collection of taste tested sauce recipes.

Pizza Sauce Recipes

Popular Pizza Recipes