Boscaiola pizza — the recipe
The woodsman's pizza: sausage and mushrooms out of the forest, fior di latte instead of tomato, and a base brushed with garlic oil. Boscaiola is the white pie that eats like a hike — earthy, rich, and entirely unbothered by the missing red.
Everything below is weighed per ball and scales with your dough. The sausage goes on raw in small nuggets and roasts in the bake, while the garlic oil quietly does the seasoning work the tomato usually would.
What goes on top
Per pizza, on the default 260 g ball — in layering order:
torn and well drained
sliced thin; raw is traditional
raw, pinched into hazelnut-size nuggets
Stretching bigger or smaller? The model rescales with the dough:
| Topping | 200 g ball | 260 g ball | 320 g ball |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garlic oil | 8 g | 10 g | 12 g |
| Fresh mozzarella | 55 g | 70 g | 85 g |
| Mushrooms | 40 g | 50 g | 60 g |
| Italian sausage | 45 g | 60 g | 75 g |
The dough
Boscaiola is built on Neapolitan dough. Soft, leopard-spotted cornicione. Flour, water, salt, yeast — nothing else. For 4 × 260 g balls:
| Ingredient | Baker's % | For 4 pizzas |
|---|---|---|
| Flour | 100% | 630 g |
| Water | 62% | 391 g |
| Salt | 2.8% | 18 g |
| Yeast | 0.23% | 1.4 g |
The yeast is weighed for an example 8 h rise at 21°C — your kitchen disagrees, and that’s the point: set your real schedule in the calculator and it reweighs the pinch.
How it’s done
- Make the dough: 4 × 260 g Neapolitan balls — the calculator weighs the flour, water, salt and yeast for your schedule.
- Stretch each ball on a little flour, pressing the air from the middle out to the rim.
- Top with 10 g garlic oil (brushed edge to edge, before anything else).
- Top with 70 g fresh mozzarella (torn and well drained).
- Top with 50 g mushrooms (sliced thin; raw is traditional).
- Top with 60 g italian sausage (raw, pinched into hazelnut-size nuggets).
- Bake at 450 °C / 842 °F — that is pizza-oven territory; at home, run the oven at full blast on a steel or stone and give it an extra minute or two.
Questions from the counter
Doesn't boscaiola come with tomato?
Both versions exist in the wild; the white one is the classic, and it's the one this page weighs. If your house insists on red, swap the garlic oil for a light hand of crushed tomatoes — but try it white first. The mushrooms speak up the moment the tomato stops talking over them.
Raw sausage on a pizza — is that safe?
Yes, if you pinch it small. Hazelnut-size nuggets of Italian sausage cook through in any pizza bake, even a fast one — they're nearly all surface. What doesn't work is thick slices or golf balls; if you'd rather not think about it, brown the nuggets briefly in a pan first and let them finish on the pizza.
What's garlic oil — can I just use plain olive oil?
Olive oil that's spent time with crushed garlic: brush it on and the base seasons itself. Plain oil works, but you lose the point of a white pizza's only sauce. A few rosemary needles steeped in the same oil is a very boscaiola move.
Get the dough
The Neapolitan preset weighs the balls and writes the schedule — mix, rise, ball, stretch, bake.
The clock is a suggestion. The dough is the boss. In bocca al lupo!
Impasto is a free pizza dough calculator for Neapolitan, New York, Roman, Sicilian, Detroit, thin crust and focaccia doughs — flour, water, salt and yeast weighed in baker's percentages, with the fermentation schedule written for you.