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You can make pizza at home if you have an oven that will break 500F.  And if you can, you should.  Its easy to make good pizza and its fun. You need a pizza stone, peel, and a good stand mixer to do the kneading. Some things I have learned over time.

  1. Start with margherita (tomato sauce, mozzarella, basil).  Once you make a good margherita you will realize there is not much point in making anything else.
  2. Use mozzarella di bufalo.  It truly makes a big difference (naturally though there is variation in quality.)
  3. To make the sauce, use canned, peeled, san marzano tomatoes, remove the seeds and puree.  Simmer in a skillet until there is no visible water pooling in the sauce and it sticks to a spoon.  This takes longer than you would expect so be patient.  (You do this while the dough is rising.)  Add only salt. No garlic, no onion, etc.
  4. No-knead dough recipes are popular recently and they work for many things but not pizza dough.  Yes it is convenient, but there is a simple reason it doesn’t work.  To form gluten without kneading you add a lot more water than you normally would.  Pizza cooks very fast.  That short time is not enough to get enough moisture out of the dough to get the bite that you want on the edges.  Water holds the temperature of the dough down because water cannot be raised above boiling temperature (think about it.)