Master the Craft of Artisan Pizza

• Anyone who wants to make their own authentic artisan pizza.
• Absolute beginners.
• Passionate cooks.
• Aspiring professional pizzaristas.
• Micro-pizzeria entrepreneurs.

• You need a kitchen with an electric oven, or a wood fired oven, indoors or out.
• For domestic ovens, you ideally need a thick ceramic baking stone, or a a cast iron Dutch oven lid.
• For wood fired ovens, the tools are listed in the course, but basic minimum is a peel and a good pair of gloves.

Running a highly successful wood fired micro-pizzeria inspired the founders of The Artisan Bakery School, Penny and Dragan, to add two day-courses in pizza-making to their curriculum; one wood fired and one not.

In this comprehensive online course, you get the benefit of BOTH those courses:  how to use your wood fired oven to best effect, and how to make your ordinary oven produce extraordinary pizza.  

Building up to this, you will learn how to:

• read your dough, and master all its stages
  make and shape a extensive range of different doughs 
• concoct delectable sauces
• design a balanced flavour profile for topping ingredients
• create finishing touches that will really elevate your pizza

Contents and Overview

Our welcome lecture introduces you to our document, How to Use this Course. In it, you will find suggestions for how to proceed, according to whether you're a complete beginner, an improver, a passionately adventurous cook, an aspiring professional or an entrepreneur considering a micropizzeria business.  You can follow the suggestions, or just work your way through every recipe as it comes up.

Following a run-down of the essential pizza-making equipment, we move on to Dough-ology, Saucery and Top-ology,  introducing a discussion about the basic ingredients, and the importance of sourcing local, organic produce wherever possible.  This is because authentic pizza, like all really good food, has a story to it.  It's  just wonderful to be able to tell your guests what's special about the tomatoes in the sauce, or the particular olives, or the artisan cheese that's on the pizza.  It adds depth to everyone's appreciation of the food.

Moving into our tried and tested Seven Steps Method, you'll have a range of different dough formulas to choose from, each with its own unique flavour and texture.  From pure Napoletana dough, through sourdough and heritage dough, right through to gluten free, you'll get to understand all the different characters and of course, how each dough has its affinities with different kinds of topping.   Simply pick yourself a formula and start at Step 1. 

Learning to read your dough is as important as being able to read the recipe for making it!  That means understanding the dough in all its moods and modes, as well as how to shape it into balls, then into pizza. You'll get plenty of practice at reading your dough, and lots of exercises in shaping it too.

In Step 3, you'll move on to making sauces, covering everything from the classic tomato sauces, through white bases to home-made pesto and even onion marmalade.   You'll also learn how to make infused garlic and chilli oils and other little finishing touches to add in Step 7, once your pizza is baked. 

You'll see how we run our Start and Finish Lines, to keep our toppings organised and our garnishes in order, and how important this is if you're making multiple pizzas!

Throughout the course, you'll find videos packed with tips and insights gleaned from years of professional pizza-making experience. 

The course finishes with 15 inspiring pizza recipes from The Artisan Bakery School,  each designed to showcase a balanced profile of salty, sweet, sour, bitter, smokey or umami flavours, and in a way that makes your dough a star of the show.

So - if you're hungry to learn, you're in the right place!