Yes, we are Italian, and yes, it’s hard for us to survive without our weekly Pizza, but honestly, who could blame us? Isn’t Pizza just one of the most amazing dishes out there? So figuring out the best pizza dough recipe for boats was a must for us.

Unfortunately, its popularity caused the creation of a multitude of lousy pizza restaurants, where random cheese ends on chewy doughs. Instead of making your taste buds happy, you end up with a stomach ache. So after too many bad Pizzas, we decided it was time for us to figure out how to make the best Pizza onboard a Sailboat.

For everyone who never cooked/ baked on a Sailboat, it’s slightly more complicated than on land. First, everything is moving, and secondly, most of the time, you have access to a gas oven, which is horrible if you are used to cooking with electric ovens with hundreds of baking options. Here you have just one - bottom heat, not even evenly spread…

So the first pizzas ended up either burned or undercooked. Moreover, backing a pizza in the oven does definitely consume too much gas (remember, we are on a sailboat, everything is limited). So we needed to find a way not to get our Pizza burned and consume way less gas.

We would love to say we developed this technique independently, but it is inspired by many sailors who came before us, especially by one happy Italian couple (grazie mille). So after testing the method (and the dough) for many, many times - looking at the pictures, I realised we made Pizza at least once a month :P - here finally, the recipe for the best Pizza you will ever taste on a sailboat.

Ingredients for 4 Pizzas and 1 Foccacia:

Starter:

5 g dry yeast

100 ml water

200g flour

Dough:

Starterdough

600 ml water

700 g flour

1 tbsp salt

10 ml olive oil

Prepare the Pizza starter

1. To prepare the starter, mix 5 g of dry yeast with 100 ml of warm water until the yeast is fully dissolved and let it sit at room temperature for 5 min.

2. Add the water yeast mixture to the flour in a bowl and mix with a wooden spoon until all the flour is fully incorporated.

3. let it sit at room temperature covered with a wet kitchen towel for 20 minutes, then knead once more and put the starter in the fridge for 24-38 hours (cover the bowl with a lid or the towel and make sure it can breathe (don't fully close if you have a lid)

Prepare the Pizza dough

1. Once the starter has matured in the fridge, take it out and let it rest at room temperature for 30 minutes. 

2. In the meantime, dissolve the salt in 600ml of warm water.

3. Pour the water into the bowl with the 700g of flour and mix with a wooden spoon for a few minutes, then add the starter and knead until the starter is completely incorporated and the dough has a nice consistency - if the dough is too liquid add a bit of flour.

4. Cover the bowl with a wet kitchen towel and let it rest at room temperature for 30 minutes.

5. The dough should have risen a bit, and you can knead it again - towards the end, add some olive oil so the dough will not stick to the bowl anymore. Else add some olive oil and then, depending on how hungry you are you can put the covered bowl back into the fridge for another day.

6. Before making Pizza, the dough should rise with a covered towel at least 3-4 hours. It should double in size during that time.

7. The dough is now ready to be formed into balls. Cover a cutting board with flour and prepare panels to put the dough onto. Cut it in 5 equal parts and sprinkle with lots of flour to form the parts into round balls.

8. Let the balls rise and rest for another hour before making the Pizza.

7. cut the dough into pieces

7. form the dough into balls

Baking the Pizza without oven

1. Prepare a big pan with a lid, a fork and a torch blower.

2. Mix some tomato sauce with oregano, salt and olive oil until the oil is fully incorporated

3. Cover the pan with a bit of flour, take a ball of dough, and form into a flat circle to cover the whole pan. The middle should be flat with nice high edges.

4. Use the fork to pierce some nice holes all around the middle part of the dough. 

5. Cover the middle part with the tomato sauce and switch on the gas to medium heat.

6. Use the torch blower to heat up the tomato sauce until it gets lightly burned or makes bubbles.

7. Add the ingredients to your Pizza and then cover with mozzarella cheese.

8. Add the lid and let cook for 5-8 minutes.

9. If Humidity forms on the lid, it should be poured away.

10. Open the lid and use the torch blower to burn the mozzarella cheese and the Pizza crust. 

11. The Pizza is ready when the bottom is nicely brown - just before it starts turning black.

3. create a flat circle of dough in the pan

5. cover the dough with tomato sauce

6. use the blow torch to cook the dough

Tips for Sailboat style pizza

• store the dry yeast in the fridge if you are sailing in warm regions

• for the best mozzarella, try to get fresh one (in water) or the block and our least favourite the already shredded one - mozzarella is white cheese and not yellow