Pepperoni pizza — the recipe
America's favorite pizza on a New York base: seasoned tomato sauce, low-moisture mozzarella edge to edge, and pepperoni that curls into crispy little cups of spiced oil.
Quantities below are per ball and scale with your dough — a 320 g ball stretches to a respectable 35 cm pie. The dough wants a day or two in the fridge; the New York preset plans it.
What goes on top
Per pizza, on the default 320 g ball — in layering order:
shredded, edge to edge
the natural-casing kind cups best
Stretching bigger or smaller? The model rescales with the dough:
| Topping | 250 g ball | 320 g ball | 450 g ball |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pizza sauce | 80 g | 100 g | 140 g |
| Low-moisture mozzarella | 85 g | 110 g | 155 g |
| Pepperoni | 45 g | 55 g | 75 g |
The dough
Pepperoni is built on New York dough. Big foldable slices. A little oil and sugar for chew and color. For 4 × 320 g balls:
| Ingredient | Baker's % | For 4 pizzas |
|---|---|---|
| Flour | 100% | 754 g |
| Water | 63% | 475 g |
| Salt | 2.5% | 19 g |
| Olive oil | 2.5% | 19 g |
| Sugar | 1.5% | 11 g |
| Yeast | 0.23% | 1.7 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 × 320 g New York 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 100 g pizza sauce.
- Top with 110 g low-moisture mozzarella (shredded, edge to edge).
- Top with 55 g pepperoni (the natural-casing kind cups best).
- Bake at 290 °C / 554 °F — on a preheated steel or stone if you have one.
Questions from the counter
Why won't my pepperoni cup?
Cupping needs natural-casing pepperoni sliced reasonably thick (about 2 mm) and real top heat. Wide sandwich pepperoni lies flat no matter what you do — it's made that way.
What goes in the sauce?
Crushed tomatoes, a little olive oil, salt, oregano and garlic powder, barely simmered or not cooked at all — New York sauce is seasoned, not stewed. 100 g per pie is plenty; more makes a soggy slice.
Get the dough
The New York 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.