Chili oil — the recipe
Olio piccante is the bottle on every pizzeria table in Italy: olive oil that a handful of dried chilies has been gossiping with. Ten minutes of nearly no work, and a finishing drizzle that outlives a whole season of diavolas.
Two ingredients, weighed below. It goes on after the bake — heat from the oven would blunt it, and the point of a finishing oil is the fresh burn.
What goes in
One batch — makes about 110 g:
crushed Calabrian if you can find them; seeds in
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Diavola | 5 g | × 22 |
How it’s done
- Warm the oil in a small pan over low heat until it shimmers — well short of smoking.
- Take it off the heat and stir in the chili flakes; they should fizz gently, not fry.
- Let it steep as it cools, then jar it, flakes and all. It sharpens overnight.
Keeps a month in a cool, dark cupboard — longer in the fridge, where it will cloud and then clear again at room temperature.
Questions from the counter
Can I use fresh chilies instead?
Better not, for a keeper: fresh chilies carry water, and water in oil is a short shelf life with safety questions attached. Dried flakes are the tradition — all the fire, none of the hurry.
How hot will it be?
As hot as your flakes. Calabrian peperoncino lands moderately hot and fruity; bird's-eye is open warfare. Start at the ratio above and tune the next batch — it's ten minutes, you can afford the science.
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.