How To Choose The Best Cheese For Your Pizza Making
Making great pizza at home isn’t difficult, but to get that real authentic restaurant style taste and look, knowing what ingredients to use is important.
When it comes to dough, you may choose to make your own, or you may be using a pre-made dough ball or part-baked pizza base such as ours. Whatever your choice, starting with a quality dough is essential in making a truly great pizza.
But your choice of cheese is equally as important. Cheese plays an important role in both the look, texture and flavour of your pizza and like many things food related, it comes in many different forms.
Mozzarella is the usual starting point for cheese on pizza. But there are many different types and varieties of mozzarella. Deciding which to use for your pizza can be a slightly difficult task. But we’re here to help you make the right choice for you.
Let’s have a look at the options available for you to decide from.
1. Buffalo Mozzarella. This style of mozzarella uses the milk produced from Water Buffalo and is produced almost exclusively in the South of Italy, specifically the Campania region. It’s a popular choice for Neopolitan style pizza, giving a rich and soft texture that gives this style of pizza its distinctive look and taste. If you’re looking to make traditional Neopolitan pizza and you are using a very hot oven, then it can work well. It is however quite wet and can make your pizza soggy, so it’s best used only for high heat, low cooking time pizza styles such as Neopolitan. It’s also expensive, but if you’re looking for the real authentic Neopolitan look and taste, then it’s worth trying it.
2. Fresh Mozzarella. Widely available in supermarkets, fresh Mozzarella usually comes packed in water in 125g balls. It’s a soft cheese and quite wet in texture, similar to Buffalo Mozzarella. It’s definitely possible to use fresh Mozzarella for your pizza making, although due to its water content, it’s better suited to high heat cooking in an outdoor oven where the heat can help burn off some of the extra moisture. It’s not a great choice for styles of pizza cooked at lower temperatures or for use in a domestic oven as it can make the pizza soggy.
3. . Fior Di Latte. Literally translating to ‘flower of milk’, Fior Di Latte is a type of Mozzarella cheese that is an ideal choice for pizza making. It comes both as a soft fresh cheese, but also available as a low moisture drier cheese, which is definitely the best choice for pizza. Fior Di Latte offers the perfect balance of creamy flavour, delightful stretchiness and browns just enough to look the part. It’s made with 100% cow’s milk containing no added starch, which means it is generally a more expensive choice, but if you’re looking for the real deal, then go with Fior Di Latte.
4. Low moisture Mozzarella. LMM can come diced, in strips or in a block which you can cut up yourself. It’s ideal for pizza making and will deliver a great result whatever style of pizza you’re making. It’s a little hard to find in the supermarkets, who often only stock the pre-grated bags of Mozzarella, which contain added starches to stop the strands sticking together. Pre-grated Mozzarella also often contains added vegetable oil to reduce cost. Unfortunately this affects the quality and most pre-grated supermarket mozzarella should be avoided. Have a look for more specialist suppliers online and try and find a good quality low moisture mozzarella. Galbani Cucina is a good option which can be found both online and also in some supermarkets. Another big advantage of low moisture mozzarella is that it copes very well with freezing.
Bonus Top Tip: Our final top tip is to plan your pizza making in advance. Our pizza dough balls and Romana pizza bases are able to be stored frozen and defrosted for use as required, but you can also buy your mozzarella in larger quantities and freeze it into portions. This only really works with low moisture mozzarella, but if you buy a block of it, you can split it down into smaller amounts and remove from the freezer the day before you want to make your pizzas. This avoids you running short of quality cheese and having to buy poor quality cheese.
In terms of how much cheese you should use, allow around 90-100g of cheese per pizza.
With a great dough and a top quality cheese, you will find it easy to start making pizzas that will wow your friends and family.
After all, everyone loves a pizza hero!
