Sauce, cheese, and topping amounts for 14 classic recipes — scaled by pie count, with a shopping list.
The platonic Neapolitan: red, white, green. Tomato, fresh mozzarella, basil, olive oil. Less is more — let each ingredient speak.
The corner-slice baseline. Uncooked New York–New Jersey sauce, low-moisture mozz, a dust of pecorino. Foldable. Greasy. Iconic.
Use natural-casing pepperoni (Ezzo, Margherita Premium) — the small-diameter sticks cup up during baking, holding little pools of rendered fat. The greatest pizza topping ever invented.
Cheese to the edges for the frico crust. Sauce in racing stripes AFTER the bake. Cup-and-char pepperoni for the trademark grease pools.
Thin square slice — olive-oil-crisped bottom, hand-crushed garlic-and-oregano sauce over the cheese, fresh basil, low-moisture mozz, finished with pecorino and good EVOO.
Kenji's Foolproof Pan Pizza, topped. Low-moisture mozzarella pushed to the skillet wall for a frico rim, cooked sauce spooned on top of the cheese, cup-and-char pepperoni.
The everyday Roman bakery square. Just crushed San Marzano, olive oil, and oregano on an open, glassy crumb — no cheese. The tomato is what the crust is built to show off.
Garlic cream base, three cheeses, fresh herbs. No tomato. Best with a thin or NY-style crust so the cheese doesn't drown the bread.
The Roman round at its plainest: a thin smear of hand-crushed tomato, torn fior di latte, basil after the bake. Thin sauce on a cracker-thin base — anything heavier makes it soggy.
Bright summer pizza: pesto base, fresh mozz, cherry tomatoes, pine nuts. Apply pesto thinly — too much and it burns black under the broiler.
Vodka sauce, fresh mozz dollops, low-moisture mozz, hot honey to finish. The 'tiktok pizza' done right — and yes, the hot honey is non-negotiable.
Liguria's everyday bread. Salamoia poured into the dimples, rosemary pressed into the wells, flaky salt on top. Four things on the pan and nothing to hide behind.
The Puglia version. Cherry tomatoes and olives pressed hard into the dimples so they half-roast into the crumb, oregano over the top. No cheese — the tomato juice does that job.
Paper-thin potato shingled over the dough, rosemary and garlic in the oil, pecorino grated on at the end. Rich, savory, and the one focaccia that eats like a meal.