Quattro stagioni pizza — the recipe
The four seasons: the capricciosa's exact cast, but with assigned seating. Ham, mushrooms, artichokes and olives each take a quadrant over the shared tomato and mozzarella, so every slice is a season and the pizza is a year.
Because each topping covers only a quarter of the pie, the quantities run lighter than the capricciosa's — the grams below are per ball and scale with your dough. Think of the unbaked pizza as a clock face and deal each season its fifteen minutes.
What goes on top
Per pizza, on the default 260 g ball — in layering order:
torn and well drained
the winter quadrant — torn
autumn — sliced thin
spring — oil-packed hearts, quartered
summer — pitted
Stretching bigger or smaller? The model rescales with the dough:
| Topping | 200 g ball | 260 g ball | 320 g ball |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crushed tomatoes | 55 g | 70 g | 85 g |
| Fresh mozzarella | 55 g | 70 g | 85 g |
| Cooked ham | 20 g | 25 g | 30 g |
| Mushrooms | 20 g | 25 g | 30 g |
| Artichoke hearts | 2 hearts | 2 hearts | 2 hearts |
| Black olives | 4 olives | 5 olives | 6 olives |
The dough
Quattro stagioni 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 70 g crushed tomatoes.
- Top with 70 g fresh mozzarella (torn and well drained).
- Top with 25 g cooked ham (the winter quadrant — torn).
- Top with 25 g mushrooms (autumn — sliced thin).
- Top with 2 artichoke hearts hearts (spring — oil-packed hearts, quartered).
- Top with 5 black olives olives (summer — pitted).
- 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
Which season is which quadrant?
The common reading: artichokes are spring, olives summer, mushrooms autumn, ham winter. Italy has never fully agreed — the tradition is the four-quadrant idea, not the seating chart, so reassign at will.
How do I keep the quadrants from blurring?
Lay the cheese a little sparser along the two center lines, place each topping working out from the middle, and don't overload — the borders survive the oven better than they survive a heavy hand. A capricciosa is just this pizza after giving up.
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.