Weirdly good, weirdly easy: 'Pizza in teglia' with potatoes

A square pizza baked on an oven tray might not seem like the real thing, but to any who doubts it, you just tell them it's called "pizza in teglia" and make an Italian gesture with your hand.

Apart from the delicious fluffy dough, the advantage to this variety is it can be prepared in any conventional kitchen. You don't need any advanced pizza-spinning knowledge or complicated kitchen utensils.

Because the dough, which contains a lot of water, is fluffier and thicker, pizza recipe blogger Julia Ma chooses an unusual topping for her tray-baked pizza.

"There's nothing stopping you from putting potatoes on a Neapolitan, round pizza," she says. "But they taste even better with the dough of the Roman teglia pizza, and a heavy topping doesn't ooze through the thicker dough," she says.

Here's how to make pizza in teglia à la Romana with potatoes (for a 28x35 cm tray).

Ingredients

For the dough:

• 285 g flour (you'll get better results from pizza flour or what Italians call "00", where the wheat has a protein content of over 12%)

• 1.5 g fresh yeast

• 230 g ice-cold water (tip: add in two ice cubes)

• 7 g fine salt

• 7 g olive oil

• some semolina

For the topping:

• 2 large potatoes

• 2 sprigs of fresh rosemary

• olive oil

• salt and pepper

• 100 g grated mozzarella.

Making the pizza

1. Place the flour in the bowl of a kneading machine, crumble in the yeast, knead on speed 1, add 185 ml of water within 1.5 minutes and the rest of the water as soon as the dough is firm and uniform.

Then slowly add the salt and oil. The total kneading time is about 20 minutes, knead the last few minutes at a higher speed.

2. Place the dough on your countertop. Fold twice from the outside inwards and leave to rest for 30 minutes. Then place in a bowl with a lid and leave to stand at room temperature for 1-2 hours, then place the bowl in the fridge for 72 hours.

If you want pizza later on the same day, this can also be done in a shorter time, but Julia Ma recommends at least 48 hours in the fridge. Remove from the fridge 3-4 hours before baking.

3. Preheat the oven to 250 degrees top-bottom heat for about 30 minutes. Meanwhile, cook the potatoes, leave to cool and peel. Cut into bite-sized pieces in a bowl. Add 3 tablespoons of olive oil and the finely chopped rosemary sprigs, season with salt and pepper.

4. Spread the dough with your fingers onto a baking tray brushed with olive oil and sprinkle with a thin layer of mozzarella. Top with the potato mixture, a little more olive oil and finally the rest of the mozzarella.

Bake for 15 minutes and sprinkle a little salt over the pizza before serving.