Pizza Pantry: Tomatoes, Cheese, Yeast and Flour

A pizza is four ingredients and a hot surface. Flour, water, salt and yeast make the dough; tomatoes and cheese make the top. Water and salt you already own, and no shop sells a version of either that will change your pizza. That leaves four things where the choice at the shelf genuinely shows up in the bake: flour, yeast, tomatoes, cheese.

They are not equally important, and they are not independent. The order below is the order to fix them in — the two that decide the dough first, because no tin of tomatoes rescues a dough that was wrong before it went in the fridge.

Flour decides what the dough can do

Flour sets the ceiling. Protein content and gluten strength decide how much water the dough will take without slumping, how long it can ferment before the structure gives out, and whether a stretched base holds its shape or tears on the way to the peel. Every other decision on this page happens inside limits the flour has already set.

It is also the ingredient with the most published, comparable specification behind it, which is why it has a cluster of its own rather than a section here. The reviews, the type-by-type comparisons and the numbers live in the flour cluster, and if you do not yet know which flour your style and schedule want, the flour quiz asks four questions and points at one.

Nothing below repeats that. Assume the flour is right, and read on.

Yeast decides when, not whether

At pizza doses yeast contributes very little flavour of its own. What it decides is the timeline: how long the dough takes to be ready, and how wide the window is when it gets there.

That makes it an arithmetic problem rather than a shopping problem. Doses run from roughly 0.2–0.7% of the flour weight for a dough fermenting at room temperature on the day, down through about 0.2% for a 48-hour cold ferment to 0.1–0.15% for a 72-hour one, and the difference between the ends of that range is the difference between a dough ready for dinner and one ready on Thursday. Get the dose wrong in one direction and the dough never rises; wrong in the other and it over-proofs in the fridge overnight. The cold fermentation guide sets out the dose-to-timeline maths, and the dough calculator does it for a given batch.

What you buy only has to be alive and consistent. The two ways home bakers lose that are a sachet that has been open in a warm cupboard since last year, and hot water: activity falls away above about 46 °C (115 °F) and the cells are killed outright at around 60 °C (140 °F), so water that feels properly hot on the wrist is already into the damage range. A vacuum-packed pouch kept in the freezer removes the first problem; a thermometer, or plain cool tap water, removes the second. SAF instant yeast is the pouch most home bakers end up with.

Tomatoes decide the sauce, because a pizza sauce is barely a recipe

A Neapolitan-style sauce is a tin of tomatoes, crushed by hand, plus about 1% salt by weight. Nothing is cooked, nothing is reduced, nothing is added to cover anything up. Whatever is in the tin is what goes on the pizza, which makes this the one ingredient where the brand on the label is doing almost all of the work.

Three things in the tin matter. The variety, because a plum tomato bred for canning has thicker walls, fewer seeds and lower acidity than a round one. The pack, because tomatoes packed in puree start thick and tomatoes packed in juice start thin — and thin sauce is one of the ways a base ends up soggy in the middle. And ripeness at harvest, which is not printed anywhere but is most of why two tins of the same variety taste different.

If your sauce tastes sharp or of nothing at all, work through flat or acidic sauce before you change tins: the most common cause is about half the salt the sauce wanted. Two tins have a review page here — Cento's Certified San Marzano and Bianco DiNapoli's Californian whole peeled — and the tomato guide ranks four, which is where the argument about seals gets settled. A marinara is the fastest way to taste what a tin actually is, since there is no cheese on it to hide behind.

Cheese decides how the top behaves in the heat you actually have

The cheese question is not which mozzarella is best. It is which one survives your oven.

Two numbers do the deciding. Moisture: fresh mozzarella runs roughly 52–60% water against 45–52% for low-moisture, and in a home oven's long bake most of that difference ends up as a puddle on the pizza rather than steam in the air — the whole of watery pizza from fresh mozzarella. And fat: whole-milk low-moisture mozzarella carries far more fat than part-skim, and that fat is what spreads across the surface and delays the point where the cheese burns before the base is cooked.

The short version is that a 90-second Neapolitan bake wants torn, drained fior di latte, and a six-to-eight-minute home bake wants whole-milk low-moisture — the comparison behind that is set out in fior di latte versus low-moisture mozzarella.

After that it is a question of form, and the mozzarella guide cards one for each answer rather than sending you elsewhere for any of them. A Polly-O block is the default: four ingredients, nothing on the cut faces, and you supply the grater. A Galbani shred saves you the grating and brings an anti-caking coating with it, in a bulk pack for a lot of pizza. A single small bag is the same trade in a size that finishes before the cut faces dry. And a fresh ball is carded too — not as an upgrade waiting for you, but as the right cheese for one oven, the 60-to-90-second bake where the water leaves as steam rather than as a puddle. A New York cheese slice is where the block-or-bag choice shows up most clearly.

Where these pages come from

From what the makers publish, and from food science that belongs to the ingredient rather than the brand.

Eleven products are carded across this cluster. Five have a review page of their own; the other six are carded on the guides. Every one of them names its source and says which kind it is, because these records are not of equal quality and smoothing over that would be the easy lie.

Two of them rest squarely on a maker's page: Polly-O publishes the four-item ingredient panel, the nutrition panel and the account of the vinegar set for its chunk, with only the pack size this listing sells coming from the seller; and Bianco DiNapoli publishes how its tomatoes are grown and what it says goes in the can — with the caveat, stated on that review, that retail panels list one ingredient more than the maker mentions. Galbani's page is thinner than the review it supports: it publishes the pack sizes and the milk types for its shredded mozzarella and nothing else, so the additive list that is the whole subject of that review — and the low-moisture classification that makes it the right cheese for a home oven at all — come from the retail listing, and are marked as the seller's figures where they appear. Lesaffre publishes the sugar tolerance and the unopened shelf life for Saf-Instant Red on its baking site and the ingredient list on redstaryeast.com, its own US consumer domain; what no page of its own says is what happens to a pouch once it has been opened, so those storage figures are the seller listings' and are marked that way where they appear. It publishes a dose too — 1-3% of flour weight — but that is general bread-baking guidance, and the fraction-of-a-percent doses on the yeast pages are this site's canon for a dough that ferments for days rather than hours; the yeast review says so in as many words rather than letting the two numbers sit unexplained. And Cento's shop page carries the origin and the variety but not the account of its own D.O.P. seal, which the company published for years and no longer serves; that one is cited to the Internet Archive, because a claim this contested should not rest on our memory of a page that has since disappeared.

The six carded without a review page run the same range, and each guide says where its own sit. Cento's detail page for the crushed tin publishes an ingredient line and a full nutrition panel; Sargento publishes both for the exact bag it sells; Red Star publishes its dough-conditioner blend and its certifications, but for a three-packet strip rather than the pouch its listing ships, which the yeast guide states rather than eliding. At the other end is La Valle, the tomato guide's top pick, which publishes no product page for its tomatoes at all — so the D.O.P. mark that puts it top is read off the tin and the listing rather than a maker's record, and the guide says that on the card as well as in its sourcing note. BelGioioso and Fleischmann's publish a little, and are carded on the little they publish and on nothing more.

The rule underneath all of that is simple: where a figure comes from a seller listing rather than a maker, the page says so in as many words instead of quietly adopting it as a fact.

We do not own a test kitchen, we run no product trials, and nothing here is ranked by first-hand use. The reasoning about what these ingredients do to a pizza is ours and it is written out on every page, so you can disagree with it and still use the numbers.