FAVO’s Own Pizza Dough Recipe: The Simple Base Behind Restaurant-Quality Pizza at Home

If you’ve read our review of the FAVO pizza oven, you’ll know we don’t hand out perfect scores lightly. After weeks of testing, and what we can only describe as an alarming number of pizzas, the FAVO earned a genuine 10 out of 10 – cooking a proper Napoli-style pizza, with real leopard-spotting on the base and a crust with genuine chew and char, in a little over ninety seconds. We described the rotating stone doing the heavy lifting, giving every part of the pizza the same violent, glorious blast of heat, rather than the usual domestic-oven lottery of a scorched left flank and a pale, sulking right one.

But even the best oven in the world needs the right dough underneath it, and high-heat ovens like the FAVO are notably fussier about this than your regular kitchen oven. This is FAVO’s own traditional pizza dough recipe, designed specifically to handle that kind of ferocious heat without burning – no sugar, oil or honey in sight, just flour, water, yeast and salt, done properly.

FAVO Pizza Dough
Makes 4 x 12″ pizzas or 3 x 16″ pizzas | Prep: 20 minutes | Rising time: 3 hours

Ingredients

600g 00 flour
400ml water, warm
7g instant dry yeast
15g salt

Method

Dissolve the yeast in the warm water.

In a large bowl, add the flour, then gradually pour in the yeast water, mixing with your hand or a spoon. If you’re using a stand mixer, a dough hook on low speed is ideal.

Add the salt and knead until smooth, about 10 minutes.

Cover and let rest for 2 hours. This is the first rise, and the dough should double in size.

Knead again briefly, then divide into 3 balls of approximately 330g each for 16″ pizzas (or into 4 smaller balls for 12″ pizzas).

Place the dough balls into a proofing tray, cover, and leave to rise for a further 60 minutes.

On a floured surface, work each dough ball from the centre outward, stretching the disc by hand to your desired size.

Get ready for favoloso pizzas!

Tips

No sugar, oil or honey is deliberate. These ingredients can burn at the high temperatures a proper pizza oven reaches, so this recipe is built specifically to handle serious heat without catching.

Make it ahead. Dough can be prepared up to 3 days in advance – simply place the divided dough balls in an airtight container and refrigerate until needed, then bring to room temperature for 4 hours before use.

Freezing works too. Spray the divided dough balls lightly with olive oil, wrap in clingwrap, and freeze. Thaw in the fridge for 24 hours, then allow a further 4 hours to reach room temperature, unwrapped, in a covered proofing tray.

Dust your peel with flour before launching the pizza into the oven, to prevent it sticking on the way in.