Mozzarella cream — the recipe
Tomato's understudy finally gets the lead: crema di mozzarella is fior di latte blended with cream until it spreads like a sauce — the white base modern Neapolitan pizzerias lay down where the red would go. It bakes into a silky layer that holds toppings the way melted cheese alone never can.
No cooking, three ingredients, one minute of blending. The reference batch is weighed below, and the per-pizza dose is read from the pizza registry — so this page and the salsiccia e friarielli can never disagree.
What goes in
One batch — makes about 300 g:
torn and well drained — the cream replaces the whey, it doesn't join it
Scaling up is linear — double everything for a double batch.
Where it goes
The classics that use it, with the dose each one takes at its default size — the same numbers their recipe pages scale to your dough:
| Pizza | Per pizza | Batch covers |
|---|---|---|
| Salsiccia e friarielli | 60 g | × 5 |
How it’s done
- Tear the mozzarella and let it drain in a sieve in the fridge for half an hour.
- Blend it with the cream and salt until completely smooth — a stick blender and a patient minute. It should pour slowly, like thick yogurt.
- Chill it briefly to set, then spread it cold on the dough. The oven does the warming; you do the restraint.
Keeps 2 days in a sealed jar in the fridge — it's fresh dairy, so treat it like milk. Don't freeze it; it splits and never forgives you.
Questions from the counter
Is this the same as 'white pizza sauce'?
It's the Neapolitan answer to it. American white sauces are usually béchamel, ricotta or an alfredo cousin — flour, garlic, parmesan. Crema di mozzarella is just the pizza's own cheese in pourable form: cleaner, milkier, and it can't turn gluey under a fast bake.
Why not just use more torn mozzarella?
Different jobs. Torn fior di latte melts where it lands, in patches, leaving bare dough between them; the cream coats the whole base evenly the way a sauce does, so every bite of a white pie gets its dairy. The salsiccia e friarielli uses exactly this trick — cream below, toppings above.
Mine turned watery on the pizza — what went wrong?
Almost always undrained mozzarella, and occasionally enthusiasm. Drain the torn cheese properly before blending, spread the cream cold, and hold the dose to what the pizza page weighs — a white base is a coat of paint, not a pool.
Put it on a pizza
The dough is the calculator’s job and the toppings are weighed on the recipe pages — this batch is ready for the classic below.
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.